?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 800
Female Provenance: Mary Kemeys (1652-1708) William Cartwright's (1611-1643) Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with other Poems.
London: Printed for [Thomas Robinson and] Humphrey Moseley, 1651.
First collected edition, octavo, with engraved author portrait frontispiece, blank f4 present; stub only of blank *8 present; leaves U-3 in their corrected state with the royalist sentiments deleted; **7 slashed for cancellation and present; a large copy with the note to the binder on ¶1 recto almost completely trimmed away; note on ****1 recto instructing the binder to insert signature *** in the center of **** perfectly legible and only slightly cropped; shoulder notes on b2 cropped; bound in full contemporary mottled calf with boards and spine tooled in gilt, joints cracking, original contemporary edge gilding; inscription dated 1670 on ffep, "Mary Kemeys her Booke, given her by her uncle George Kemeys of Lanvaire," nicely preserved, with some minor spotting and worming, 6 5/8 x 4 1/4 in.
The Kemeys family were wealthy land-owning inhabitants of the town of Llanvair Discoed in Monmouthshire, Wales. Mary's father was Sir Charles Kemeys 2nd Baronet (1614-1658). Uncle George Kemeys (1648-1696) of Llanvair Discoed Castle and Manor, who died without heirs was Sir Charles's much younger half-brother by their father's second wife, Jane Bussey. Mary, who never married and is named in court papers as one of her uncle's heirs, was born in 1652 and passed away in 1708. Llanvair Discoed Castle was originally built by the Fitzpayn family on top of an even earlier castle in the first quarter of the 13th century. In 1635, Rhys Kemeys (d. 1609) built a home near the grounds of the crumbling castle, which was subsequently abandoned completely and exists now only as a ruin. (For more see: P.R. Davis's Forgotten Castles of Wales and the Marches, Eardisley, 2021; [and] https://medievalheritage.eu/en/main-page/heritage/wales/llanvair-discoed-castle/)
Wing C-709; Greg III pp. 1027-1031; Sabin 11166; ESTC R208874.
