[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS RANDOLPH - THE MUSES LOOKING-GLASSE - 1643

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, March 7. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/y7vp8rhy

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


[Thomas Randolph:] The Muses Looking-Glasse. By T. R. London: [n.p.], 1643. Slim 12mo (14 cm) in modern calf-backed boards; [2] + 84 pp. Front paste-down with the bookplate of the Hodgson Bequest to Rugby School Library (no other library marks); contents mildly browned, occasional light spots and stains.

Extracted from the 1643 edition of Randolph's Poems. A comedy in verse by this "son of Ben Jonson," featuring a play-within-a-play that mirrors the follies and vices of humankind. In the (very funny) opening scene, set outside a "play-house" (theatre), two hypocritical Puritan street vendors, "Bird, a Feather-man, and Mrs. Flowerdew," a hawker of "Pins and Looking-glasses," try to outdo each other in their loathing and disdain for the immorality of the theatre ("this house of sin, this cave of filthynesse, this den of spiritual theeves"), before confessing that they've both come to sell their wares to the theatregoers ("'Tis fit that we...should gain by Infidels"). A good picture of the London playhouses extant at the time can be gleaned from Mrs. Flowerdew's summary of a "good, zealous prayer" she heard a preacher make concerning them: "That the Globe, wherein (quoth he) reigns a world of vice, had been consum'd; the Phoenix burn't to Ashes; the Fortune whipt for a blind whore; Black-Fryers he wonders how it scap'd demolishing i' th' time of reformation; Lastly, he wish'd the Bull might crosse the Thames to the Bear-Garden, and there be soundly baited."