The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke

£27,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very good, spine slightly grubby, slight spots of soiling to tail of upper cover, small linear scratch to upper corner, internally fine and free from foxing which sometimes affects this edition. With the ownership signature of Jo Mielziner, dated 1930, the year of publication. A landmark of both 20th century fine printing and theatre, owned, presumably from new, by Jo Mielziner, one of the most important theatre designers of the 20th century, who was directly inspired by both the work of Edward Gordon Craig and the Moscow Art Theatre. Mielziner’s resume as a theatre designer is simply breathtaking, including Guys and Dolls , A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and the recipient of an Academy Award for his work on the film Picnic. The director Mike Nichols, who directed the 2012 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman described Milziner’s work best: ‘It’s everything and nothing. You can go places you didn’t even know existed on the stage, and they’re there and then they’re gone, you can dissolve the way you do in a movie from one scene to the other’. If this description sounds as if it could apply equally to Edward Gordon Craig’s illustrations for the Cranach Hamlet and design for the staging by the Moscow Art Theater, it is no coincidence. Milziner was profoundly and directly influenced by both during a visit to Europe in 1922; in Paris he saw the Moscow Art Theater perform The Brothers Karamazov in a remarkably minimalist staging, ‘the exper

• Binding: Hardcover

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