SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. 1564-1616.


The Tempest; The Two Gentlemen of Verona. [London: Printed by Thomas Cotes, 1632.] Folio (310 x 217 mm). 38 pp. Modern red morocco backed cloth. Upper border shaved, affecting headline and pagination on a few leaves, minor soiling to leaves.THE SECOND PRINTING OF TWO OF SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES INCLUDING ONE OF HIS MOST ENDURING, THE TEMPEST, extracted from the 1632 Second Folio, and handsomely bound. Neatly capturing Shakespeare's talents and preoccupations at the beginning and end of his writing career, Two Gentlemen is sometimes presented as his first play, and The Tempest is believed by some to be the last play that he wrote alone. Today The Tempest is widely regarded as one of Shakespeare's greatest works, and is frequently produced, with a multitude of opera, literary, and film adaptations. Although nowadays a less popular work, the Shakespeare scholar E.K. Chambers notes that Two Gentleman "was Shakespeare's first assay at originality, at fashioning for himself the outlines of that romantic or tragicomic formula in which so many of his most characteristic dramas were afterwards to be cast. Something which is neither quite tragedy nor quite comedy, something which touches the heights and depths of sentiment and reveals the dark places of the human heart without lingering long enough there to crystallise the painful impression...."