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VENUS AND ADONIS
FIRST EDITION, 1593.
Giles Fletcher, which was published in the same year, and of which also no other complete copy has been met with. The volume is now numbered Malone 325, and bears on the fly-leaf an autograph note by Malone, of which the last sentences run:—‘Many years ago I said that I had no doubt an edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis was published in 1593, but no copy of that edition was discovered in the long period that has elapsed since my first notice of it, nor is any other copy of 1593 but the present known to exist.’ No second copy has been yet discovered in the century that has elapsed since Malone wrote these words.
The copy—a quarto—measures $7\frac{3}{4}'' \times 5\frac{1}{4}''$, and is in good condition. The leaves number twenty-seven. The title-page and dedicatory epistle are unsigned leaves, but the text of the poem is printed on leaves bearing signatures in fours from B (Bij, Biij) to H. The copy has been twice reproduced already; firstly, in 1867, by Mr. E. W. Ashbee, in lithographic facsimile, at the expense of James Orchard Halliwell[-Phillipps] (only fifty impressions were taken, of which nineteen were destroyed, and thirty-one alone were suffered to survive); secondly, in 1886, by Mr. William Griggs, in photo-lithography, for the Shakspere-Quarto facsimiles published by Mr. Bernard Quaritch of Piccadilly (No. 12, with an introduction by Mr. Arthur Symons).
SECOND EDITION, 1594.
Of the edition of 1594—also a quarto—Malone remained in ignorance to the last. But at least three copies with the title-pages identical with those of the first edition were known to others in his time, and remain accessible. The three copies are now, respectively, in the British Museum, in the Bodleian Library, and in the library of Mr. A. H. Huth.
No. II.
Brit. Mus. (Grenville) copy, 1594.
The British Museum copy was at one time the property of Thomas Jolley, F.S.A., the well-known collector in the early years of the nineteenth century. He stumbled upon it in one of his Lancashire rambles, in a volume which also contained the first edition of the Sonnets of 1609 and was purchased for a few pence.¹ At the sale of Jolley’s library in 1844 it was bought
¹ See T. F. Dibdin’s Library Companion, 1824, p. 808.
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