[Rarebooks] fa: MRS. INCHBALD - THE BRITISH THEATRE 1808 - 24 vols./120 Plays - w/ Engravings

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, March 17. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/kqrbxkk

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Elizabeth Inchbald (ed.): The British Theatre, or, A Collection of Plays, which are acted at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and Haymarket. Printed under the authority of the managers of the prompt books. With Biographical and Critical Remarks, by Mrs Inchbald. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst [etc.], 1808. First collected edition. Twenty-four (of 25) volumes, 12mo, in period calf; engraved frontispieces and plates throughout.

Lacking vol. 25. Externally rough but internally very good. Wear and bumping to the edges; spines dried, rubbed and flaking; joints cracked with some boards detached; mild offsetting from the plates, occasional light foxing to the margins of the plates, a few occasional small spots or touches of soiling, but the contents are generally very clean and fresh. A few plates and plays bound out of order. Each volume with the engraved armorial bookplates of Abraham Ludlow and Gaillard Thomas Lapsley (Cambridge historian, friend of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and the latter's literary executor).

Includes plays by most of the great (as well as many all-but-forgotten) names of the British drama, with an emphasis on works from the later Eighteenth Century. Included are: Shakespeare (of course, with 5+ vols.), Ben Jonson, Beaumont & Fletcher, Massinger, Dryden, Farquhar, Wycherley, Colley Cibber, Mrs. Centlivre, Otway, John Gay, Charles Macklin, George Colman (the Older and the Younger), Goldsmith, Sheridan, Richard Cumberland, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Holcroft, General John Burgoyne, and many others, including Mrs. Inchbald herself. Of particular interest are the quirky, moralistic and often highly critical prefatory "Remarks" by Inchbald, herself a novelist, actress, and successful playwright with some eighteen plays to her credit. Of the characters in The Gamester by Edward Moore, for example, she writes: "the husband [is] a very silly man, and the wife a very imprudent woman... Stukely is so outrageously wicked, that his character can hardly comprise either moral or example... The only reasonable persons in this play, the author has, very unjustly, made the only insipid ones..." And of Susannah Centilivre’s Bold Stroke for a Wife: “probability is so often violated, that the effect, though powerful, is that of farce, and not genuine comedy." The prefaces are also embellished with theatre lore and anecdotes about authors and actors. i.e.: "With the various earnings of his pen, … poor Gay, in search of riches, placed all he had accumulated in the bank of the famous South Sea Company. - His warmest wishes were soon accomplished, and his little fortune become treble. – He was advised to sell out, and purchase an  annuity with his increased store – he waited to have it still augmented, and lost every guinea he was worth in the world." Largely thanks to Inchbald's prefaces, the collection "remains an invaluable contribution in reconstructing the theories of drama and acting at the end of the Eighteenth Century" (H.R. Jauss, "The Art of Fine Drama: Inchbald’s Remarks for The British Theatre and the Aesthetic Experience of the Late Eighteenth-Century Theatre Goer").