Geoffrey Chaucer, The workes, London, 1561, contemporary calf

Geoffrey Chaucer

The workes… newlie printed, with divers addicions, whiche were never in print before. [London: John Kingston for John Wright], 1561

Folio (312 x 210mm.), Black Letter, letterpress title within woodcut architectural border, section titles for The Canterbury Tales and The Romaunt of the Rose within wide woodcut borders, woodcut initials and illustrations, title with contemporary and slightly later manuscript inscriptions and quotations, contemporary ruled calf, title repaired and laid down, some other repairs with minor loss, lacking the last leaf, supplied in ?seventeenth-century ink, binding somewhat worn, rebacked and repaired

[with, loosely inserted:] Chidiock Tichborne, scribal manuscript copy of part of 'Tichborne's Lament', seven lines in an Elizabethan secretary hand, with contemporary corrections to two lines in a darker ink, with significant variants from the established text, on a paper fragment (45 x 125mm), some staining and fraying with remains of red wax seals

The woodcuts are based on those used by Caxton for his famous edition of 1483; some of the blocks here were used by Richard Pynson. Caxton’s editions had the woodcut for each character in both the prologue and start of each tale, but this was reduced in subsequent editions to the prologues only, with the exception of the first tale in the book, the Knight’s Tale. Kingston also issued this work without any woodcuts in the prologue, possibly because he only obtained the blocks part way through printing (see D.R. Carlson, “Woodcut illustrations of the Canterbury Tales, 1483–1602”, The Library, 19 (1997), 25–67, p.50)

This book also contains a loose fragment of 'Tichborne's Lament', or Elegy, which was written shortly before the author's execution for his involvement in the Babington Plot. The poem was widely circulated in manuscript form with numerous textual variants. 50 manuscript copies are recorded in CELM.

LITERATURE

STC 5076

PROVENANCE

Rob: Smithe, contemporary ownership inscription on title