John. Plays. Being: An Unhistorical Pastoral. A Romantic Farce. Bruce a Chronicle Play. Smith a Tragic Farce. And Scaramouch in Naxos a Pantomime.

by DAVIDSON

£300 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

An Early Copy DAVIDSON, John. Plays. Being: An Unhistorical Pastoral. A Romantic Farce. Bruce a Chronicle Play. Smith a Tragic Farce. And Scaramouch in Naxos a Pantomime. [ London: Ballantyne Press for ] John Lane and Elkin Mathews and Chicago: Stone and Kimball . 1894. 8vo. Publisher’s bevelled plum cloth, spine lettered in gilt, gilt masked Pierrot by Beardsley to upper board; pp. [8], 294, 14 (advertisements), [2]; frontispiece by Beardsley; slight wear to spine ends; light browning at head; but a very good copy; contemporary Blackwell’s ticket to front pastedown, 1897 booklabel of W.A. Marsden to front pastedown, with manuscript key to the frontispiece (presumably by Marsden) loosely inserted. First edition, one of 500 copies printed for distribution in England, with a frontispiece and title-page vignette by Beardsley (repeated to upper board), from the library of W.A. Marsden, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum. Scottish playwright, novelist, and translator John Davidson (1857–1909) was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, a friend of Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats, and an influence on T.S. Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Wallace Stevens. Davidson committed suicide by drowning and had expressed during his life that none of his unpublished works should be brought to light posthumously and that no biography should be written. Beardsley had also produced a frontispiece for Davidson’s 1895 Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender . Loosely inserted is a

• Binding: Hardcover

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