A Collection of Poems, In Two Volumes

Fleet-Street: Bernard Lintott, 1710. Hardcover. Good. The first volume of Lintott's Collection of Poems in Two Volumes collects, for the first time, "Venus and Adonis", "The Rape of Lucrece", "The Passionate Pilgrim" and "Some Sonnets Set to Sundry Notes of Musick". The second adds the most accurate early edition of all 154 Sonnets and "A Lover's Complaint of his Angry Mistress", to form the first complete collection of Shakespeare's poetry. This book has been professionally restored to reattach the covers and strengthen the binding, leaving it ready for study or display.

In 1640, John Benson had published a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets (truncated) and miscellaneous poems, rearranging and altering the sonnets, most notably by obscuring the references to the "fair youth." In contrast, Lintott's work maintains a remarkable fidelity to his sources. In the "Advertisement" to the first volume he notes:
"I will say nothing of Venus and Adonis, nor of the Rape ofLucrece, they being universally allow'd to be Shakespear's, only that I have printed them from very old Editions, which I procur'd, as the Reader will find by my keeping close to his spelling."
Giles Dawson describes Lintott's edition as a model of accuracy for the period: "the texts gave the poems to the public in a form little altered from the first editions. The fact that this admirable publication was driven from the market by a much inferior rival affords a striking example of the kind of harmful influence that unmitigated commercialism has exerted in the book trade." Curll's nearly contemporaneous edition adopted Benson's alterations and modernized the other texts, and proved a more commercially successful work.

The second state of the work as described in the Folger Library Catalog, with a general title page (lacking in the first state), title pages for each volume, and the correct dates on the interior title pages of 1630, 1632, 1599, 1599 (altered in the third state). Variant title page without the price bound statement. While the first volume was published in 1709, the two volume version is undated, attributed by Jaggard to 1710.

Later binding, professionally restored to reattach the covers and strengthen the joints. Wear and loss to the corners and the head and tail of the spine.

Several pages show evidence of early damage and repair. Most notably, the general title page, the title page to the first volume, and the internal title page to "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke" have had slips cut out, and then carefully repaired, most likely to remove the marks of a previous owner. One such mark in that position survives on the internal title to 'The Rape of Lucrece'.

Octavo. [vi], 155 [1]; [iv], 98 pp. 6.25 x 4".

ESTC T138086. Jaggard Shakespeare Bibliography p. 434. Giles E. Dawson, "Four Centuries of Shakespeare Publication", University of Kansas Libraries, 1964. (Inventory #: 2023-P30)