First edition.

Binding inspired by Seventeenth century Cambridge panelled boards, spine with five raised bands framed by double fillets in blind, boards framed by double fillets in blind, outer corners of central frame decorated with small fleurons tools in blind, decorated roll inside central frame, decorated roll in blind on edges, all edges gilt, a corner and edge and lower spine-end slightly rubbed, some chafing on boards, a small hole p. 8 affecting part of a letter.

Very scarce first editions of The Staple of News and The Devil is an Ass by Ben Jonson, master of comedy and satire who appears alongside Shakespeare as the most celebrated playwright of the English Renaissance.

These two delightful satires of the modern world were performed by the King’s Men, respectively in 1626 and 1616. As Jean-Christophe Mayer observes, “Shakespeare and Jonson had clearly understood that the present was beginning to take on a quite particular importance for their contemporaries, who would, as the years went by, become avid consumers of current events.” (in Modernité, représentation de l’histoire et présentisme dans le théâtre shakespearien). The printed press was barely in its infancy when Jonson wrote The Staple of News: the first play mocking the feverish appetite for information among readers, staging games of speculation and inflation around news of every kind. He then continued his sharp description of his contemporaries in The Devil is an Ass: “Satan sends one of his demons to London to recruit new souls. But this poor devil finds himself so thoroughly outpaced, in every old vice and every old trick of hell, by modern usurers, ruffians, and swindlers of high and low degree alike, that he no longer knows where he stands, allows himself to be duped, and returns to the dark empire reviled and mocked by all.” (Ernest Lafond).

These rare imprints follow Jonson’s First Folio (1616), a landmark in English literary history as the first printed edition of an author’s works supervised by the author himself. Jonson was moreover instrumental in the publishing of Shakespeare’s First Folio, which opens with his verses ‘To the Reader’ and also contains his eloquent tribute ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us’. The two plays in the present volume were published simultaneously with a third, Bartholomew Fair, to form a collection that never came to fruition:

“The lack of a general title page on this collection has led scholars to offer several theories seeking to explain how and if it was ever sold to readers (see Greg 3:1075-76; Creaser 2014). One theory is that copies of the edition may have been sold as a supplement to Jonson’s 1616 Works (DEEP 5074-5075). Alternatively, copies of the collection, but also of the individual plays in it, may have been distributed as private gifts by Jonson. [...] It is also possible that the plays were intended to be sold separately, despite the use of continuous signatures in the collection and the use of continuous pagination in Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass. Another possibility is that Jonson prevented copies from being sold by the publisher, Robert Allott, and likewise prevented other works from being printed for the collection in 1631, because of Jonson’s dissatisfaction with John Beale’s printing of the three plays in it. The three plays in the collection were issued again in 1640” (Database of Early English Playbooks).

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A fine association of two Jonsonian comedies issued by Allot, who would go on to publish the celebrated Shakespeare Second Folio the following year.

ESTC ; STC 14753.5. A bibliography of the English printed drama to the Restoration, 456. 1631 ; 457. 1631.