SHAKESPEARE, William.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. First edition, one of 40 copies, here inscribed by the editor on the title page, "Presented to Peter Cunningham Esq by his old & sincere friend, J. Payne Collier, Maidenhead Sept. 1858". Copies were mostly given directly to libraries, and are rare in commerce.The 1603 First Quarto printing of Hamlet is reproduced using photolithogaphy from two copies of the First Quarto owned by William Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire. The work was funded and privately printed by the Duke. "This facsimile and its twin [Collier's follow-up Q2 Hamlet facsimile in 1859] were remarkably well done - there was little retouching, and the results are closer to the originals than were the Griggs-Furnival photolitho facsimiles of the 1880s - and they were moreover the forerunners of a method of book production that was to challenge letterpress printing itself a hundred years later" (Gaskell, pp. 270-1).John Payne Collier (1789-1883)was an eminent Shakespearian scholar and librarian to the Duke of Devonshire. He became embroiled in a forgery scandal after publishing a heavily "corrected" edition of the Second Folio in 1852 from an annotated copy he claimed to have found in the Duke's library. This forgery, known as the Perkins Folio, among others such as his forged Samuel Taylor Coleridge lecture notes, ruined Collier's reputation. Peter Cunningham (1816-1869) was an Anglo-Scottish author and academic who published several biographies of prominent

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