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- 5-^ VENUS AND ADONIS
First
Edition,
1593.
No. I.
Bodleian
(M alone)
copy of
M93-
surviving
twenty-one
copies
of
the
early
editions.'
For
pur-
poses of
reference
they
are
numbered
consecutively.
Of the first edition, which is reproduced in this volume^
only a single copy is known to exist. It is among the books
which belonged to Edmund Malone, the Shakespearean
commentator, and are now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The story of Malone's acquisition of the rare volume is
interesting. At the outset of his career as a Shakespearean
commentator he sought in vain for any early edition of
l^erius and Adonis. In his behalf, Thomas Longman, ' book-
seller, ofPaternoster Row,' offered, without result, a giiinea
for that of 1793 ^"^ ^^ advertisement in the St. Jameses
Chronicle on April if, 1779. In 1780, in his < Supplement
to the edition of Shakespeare's plays ' which Dr. Johnson
and George Steevens had jointly prepared in 1778, he issued
a text of the dramatist's 'genuine poetical compositions \
But he found it impossible to print Vmus and Adonis ' from
the original copies '. ' Though much inquiry was made for it,'
Malone wrote in the Advertisement, < the editor has not been
able to procure the first edition.' He acknowledged, however,
the loan from Dr. Farmer ' of a copy of that poem published
in i5oo'. Dr. Farmer's copy, which was without a title-page,
is now in the Bodleian Library with Malone's books (see No.
VllI, infray A ^Qw years after the publication of his text
"• Much information respecting the extant copies of Venus a?id Adonis is
collected in Justin Winsor's valuable, but inaccessible, Shakespeare's Foems :
a hihliography of the earlier editions (Library of Harvard University, Biblio-
graphical Contributions, No. i, Cambridge, Mass., 1879). Valuable sugges-
tions are made in the Cambridge Shakespeare^ vol. 38, 1895, preface; in
Charles Edmond's Preface (v-xxii) to Venus and Ado7iis from the hitherto unknown
edition of i ^c;9 (1870), and in Lowndes' Bibliographer's Manual (ed. H. G. Bohn,
s. V. Shakespeare, i'&6^). I have personally inspected most of the volumes
described which remain in England. I owe my main knowledge of those in
America to descriptions furnished by their present owners. I liave to
thank the American collectors, Mr. Robert Hoe, Mr. H. C. Folger, jr., and
Mr. Marsden J. Perry, for courteous replies to my inquiries.
= On April zp, 1779, Malone wrote to the Earl of Charlemont, 'Do you
happen to be possessed of any ancient edition of Shakespeare's poem of
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