The Works of William Shakspeare. Comprising His Dramatic and Poetical Works, Complete; Accurately Printed from the Text of the Corrected Copy Left by the Late George Stevens, Esq., with a Glossary and Notes, and a Memoir by Alexander Chalmers, A.M.
Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1855. Good. Item #381 Thick octavo (9 x 6 x 3 in.). Complete in one volume. Bound in contemporary half calf over pebbled cloth boards, spine with five raised bands, gilt title “Works of Shakspeare,” and decorative tooling in compartments. Marbled endpapers and edges. Illustrated with full-page steel engravings, including frontispiece portraits of Shakespearean heroines (“Mistress Page,” “Perdita,” and others), each with tissue guards. Binding rubbed and worn with loss to corners and edges, the leather mellowed to a rich brown patina. Front hinge tender, though holding; pages evenly toned with extensive foxing throughout, especially to preliminaries and plates. Several leaves with short closed tears or creases, one early leaf of The Tempest with triangular loss with some text missing. A handsome, well-used nineteenth-century reading edition, still sound and evocative in hand. This 1855 Boston printing of The Works of William Shakspeare represents the mid-nineteenth century’s renewed enthusiasm for accessible, single-volume editions of England’s national poet. Issued by Phillips, Sampson & Co.—one of Boston’s most ambitious literary publishers of the 1850s—it reflects the democratization of Shakespeare in the transatlantic book trade: a text meant as much for parlour and schoolroom as for the scholar’s desk. Edited from the “corrected copy” of George Steevens, with a memoir by Alexander Chalmers, this edition belongs to the long editorial lineage that sought to bring Shakespeare’s works into the age of modern criticism while retaining their Elizabethan spirit. The inclusion of engraved portraits, delicately printed on steel plates, embodies the Victorian ideal of moral refinement through art—a Shakespeare both read and revered. Its physical state tells its own story: foxing as a kind of domestic patina, the mottling of paper by candlelight and use. It is the sort of volume that might once have rested on a mantelpiece, read aloud by fire, sustaining the poet’s words as living speech rather than library monument.
Sold