?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
Painter, William (1540?-1594) The Palace of Pleasure Beautified Adorned and Well-furnished with pleasaunt Histories and Excellent Novels, [and] The Second Tome.
London: by Thomas Marshe, 1575.
Two quarto volumes, volume one with water stain on approximately four leaves; last four-leaf signature most likely supplied from another copy; volume two title page text in pen facsimile and mounted within a border that may or may not be genuine, and if genuine certainly borrowed from another book, approximately forty leaves toned and weakened from chemical washing, last signature (Zz4) & preliminary leaf A8 supplied from a smaller copy, some wormholes filled, lacking preliminary blank, A6 & A7 mistakenly bound directly after the title page; although some leaves are clearly supplied from other copies because they are smaller, the reader should assume that this is a made-up copy, a veteran of the notorious "book hospitals" of the book trade of yore; the married set bound in modern parchment over stiff boards with yapp edges, green ribbon ties, by the Aquarius bindery, aeg; 7 x 4 3/4 in. (2)
Painter's Palace of Pleasure provided English translations of a number of Italian Renaissance stories pivotally important to the development and advancement of Elizabethan theater in Britain. Here we find Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, and works of Boccaccio, Marguerite of Navarre, and classical authors including Herodotus, Plutarch, Tacitus, Livy, and others. Beaumont and Fletcher's Triumph of Death, John Webster's Dutchess of Malfi, and Shirley's Love's Cruelty can all be traced to source material in Painter.
I: STC 19123; ESTC S106506 citing seven copies in American libraries and four in UK institutions; II: STC 19125; ESTC S113378 citing twelve copies in American libraries (of which five are at the Folger), and five copies in UK libraries.
