Holinshed's Chronicles, three parts in two volumes (Revised "Shakespeare" Edition)

A$12,000 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

A landmark of English historiography, censored within months of publication by order of the Privy Council and the direct textual source from which Shakespeare built his own histories. There are very few books in the English language whose direct textual influence on a single other writer can be traced with the precision that scholarship has established for Holinshed's Chronicles and William Shakespeare. W. G. Boswell-Stone and H. R. D. Anders, in their landmark studies Shakespeare's Holinshed (1896) and subsequent scholarship, demonstrated conclusively that this second edition of 1587 was the text Shakespeare had directly before him as he wrote. He drew on it, in whole or in significant part, for at least ten plays: Richard II , Richard III , both parts of Henry IV , Henry V , all three parts of Henry VI , Henry VIII , Cymbeline , and Macbeth , together with portions of King Lear . The complete narrative of Macbeth's rise and fall, rendered by Holinshed with a moral ambivalence Shakespeare would sharpen into tragedy, is found entire within these pages; Holinshed's own description of Macbeth as "a valiant gentleman" who might, "if he had not beene somewhat cruell of nature," have been reckoned fit to govern a realm, anticipates the psychological complexity Shakespeare would build his play upon. The Chronicles began under the London printer Reyner Wolfe, whose ambition was originally a universal history of the world; on his death in 1573 the project passed to a syndicate of the

• Binding: Hardcover

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