CHAUCER, Geoffrey.

£4,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Works: Final Speght edition, the last to be printed in black letter, and the eighth collected edition overall. This is a reprint of Thomas Speght's 1602 edition, with the addition on the verso of the last leaf of the first printings of the conclusions to the Cook's and the Squire's Tales, then recently discovered. Thomas Speght (d. 1621) developed a passion for Chaucer while studying at Cambridge, and maintained this interest well after graduating. He worked on several editions of the complete works, the first published in 1598; his notes were more elaborate than in any other previous edition, and he was the first to provide a glossary. The present 1687 edition "remained in use even after the publication of John Urry's much reviled Chaucer edition of 1721. Thomas Tyrwhitt, editing the Canterbury Tales in the 1770s, used the 1602 and 1687 editions of Speght, taking the latter as his base text. With a period of influence stretching from the late sixteenth century to the late eighteenth, then, Speght's Chaucer has been the most durable of any Chaucer edition" (ODNB).In this edition, the list of "Old and Obscure Words in Chaucer explained" is marked with derivations, and a gloss has been added translating the Latin and French "not Englished" by Chaucer. Speght's influential biography of Chaucer, also included, shaped all future descriptions of the poet's life up until the 1840s, and notably established the common belief that he was once fined for beating a Franciscan friar in

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