[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS RYMER - THE TRAGEDIES OF THE LAST AGE + A SHORT VIEW OF TRAGEDY - 1692

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th, 18th & 19th-Century English titles,  
auctions ending Sunday, October 9. More details and images can be  
found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/arch_in_la/m.html?_trksid=p4340.l2562

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

"Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye; And  
certainly, never was any Play fraught , like this of Othello, with  
improbabilities..."
Thomas Rymer: The Tragedies of the Last Age, Consider’d and Examin’d  
by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the Common Sense of all Ages  
in a Letter to Fleetwood Shepheard, Esq.; By Mr. Rymer Servant to  
Their Majesties. Part I. The Second Edition. London: Printed and are  
to be sold by Richard Baldwin, 1692. [BOUND WITH:] A Short View of  
Tragedy; It’s Original, Excellency, and Corruption. With some  
Reflections on Shakespear, and other Practitioners for the Stage.  
London: Printed and are to be sold by Richard Baldwin, 1693. FIRST  
EDITION. Small 8vo (17.5 cm); early/period calf rebacked with modern  
calf spine, gilt-stamped morocco label; [16] + 144 pp.; [16] + 182 +  
[2] pp.; with the license leaf, blank leaf, and leaf of publisher's  
adverts. ESTC R7998 and R17017; Wing R2431 and R2429; Pforzheimer 844  
(for the second title).

First edition thus, and the first complete edition. Rymer published  
his Tragedies of the Last Age in 1678, but with the imminent  
publication of A Short View of Tragedy in 1693, the first edition  
sheets of his earlier work were reissued with a new title-page stating  
"Second edition" and subtitled "Part I", the Short View being in fact  
the second part. Boards bumped and worn at the corners; mild toning/ 
darkening to the edges of the text block, some damp-staining (mostly  
mild) and occasional small spots; small ink notes by an early owner to  
the title-pages and unobtrusively to several leaves of text; otherwise  
contents are clean and crisp, firmly bound. Neither title is common  
and it is decidedly uncommon to find them together, especially so  
complete, as here, with the first title's initial license leaf (dated  
"July 17, 1677"), and the second title's initial blank leaf and  
terminal leaf of publisher's advertisements.

Thomas Rymer (1641-1713) was a poet, translator, antiquary and trained  
lawyer; he was also a failed playwright, which may have colored his  
criticism more than anything else. A fanatical devotee of the  
classical drama and a stickler for the Aristotelian unities, he  
decried English dramatic poetry as being "as bad as our  
architecture" ("we delight in bloody spectacles... Yet after all, I  
fear what Quintilian pronounced concerning the Roman Comedy, may as  
justly be said of English Tragedy: In Tragedy we come short extreamly;  
hardly have we a slender shadow of it"). In the first title here,  
largely a critique of works by Beaumont and Fletcher, Rymer coined the  
phrase "poetic justice." The second title  contains his notorious  
attack on Shakespeare, and Othello and Julius Caesar in particular, in  
which the Bard is accused of committing inconsistencies, historical  
inaccuracies, dramatic improbabilities, and worst of all, of  
intermingling "vulgar" comedy with tragedy: "There is in this Play,  
some burlesk, some humour,... some shew, and some Mimickry to divert  
the spectators: but the tragical part is plainly none other than a  
Bloody Farce, without salt or savour." Ben Jonson also comes in for a  
hard time. While Rymer had his supporters, Dryden among them,  
posterity has for the most part regarded him with feelings closer to  
Macaulay's when he pronounced him "the worst critic that ever lived."