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- LUCRECE 39
FIRST EDITION, 1594
The first edition of *Lucrece* is the only one which appeared in quarto. The signatures run:—A i, A ii, B–N, in fours. There are forty-seven leaves in all without pagination. The dedication figures on the recto side, and the ‘Argument’ on the verso side, of the leaf signed A ii. The text of the poem commences on the leaf signed B. The title-page runs:—LVCRECE | [Field’s device and motto] LONDON | Printed by Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, and are | to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound | in Paules Churh-yard 1594. | The pattern of Field’s device of the suspended anchor, with his motto *Anchora Spei*, slightly differs from that on the title-page of *Venus and Adonis*. In the *Lucrece* volume the boughs are crossed in front of the stem of the anchor, instead of being figured behind the stem, as in the *Venus and Adonis* volume.
The copy of the first edition of the poem, which is reproduced in facsimile for the first time in this volume, is one of the two exemplars now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It belongs to the collection of books which was presented in 1816 to the library by the brother of Edmund Malone, the Shakespearean commentator, and is numbered Malone 34. In the spring of 1779, Malone bought for twenty guineas a single volume containing this copy of the first edition of *Lucrece*, together with a first edition of Shakespeare’s *Sonnets*.¹ At a later date he caused these and many other of his quarto editions of Shakespeare’s works to be inlaid and
No. I.
Bodleian(1).
a sale in 1902. At the present moment the prices are rapidly rising. A perfect copy of a first edition would be likely to reach £1000, and a perfect copy of any later edition of the seventeenth century, £500. Justin Winsor’s *Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Poems* (Boston, 1879), and the preface to the Cambridge Shakespeare (new edit, 1891), supply some useful particulars in regard to extant copies, but most of the information recorded here has been derived from a personal inspection of the copies, or from correspondence with the present owners, or from sale catalogues.
¹ Charlemont MSS. (*Hist. MSS. Comm. Rep.*), i. 343.
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