Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare.
ANNOTATED BY UNA "I ALWAYS THOUGHT THIS WAS FROM ‘HAMLET?!”. Shakespeare, William. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. Printed from the text of J. Payne Collier, Esq. F.S.A., with the life and portrait of the poet. Complete in seven volumes. Vol. VI. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1844. 12mo.; publisher's vellum, stamped in gilt; purple morocco spine label; covers rubbed; a well worn copy.
Signed in ink opposite the title page, Una Hawthorne, and beneath it, in pencil, Beatrix Hawthorne. On the front endpapers, Una has transcribed in pencil, in its entirety, the Milton poem, "On Shakespeare":
What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
To labor of an age in piled stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-y pointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For, whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
Una added a remark in the margin of Othello, at the lines, “Who steals my purse, steals trash... And makes me poor indeed,” commenting, “I always thought that was from ‘Hamlet'!” Light pencil lines appear occasionally throughout the margins of all the plays. This volume contains Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline.
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