Hippolytus Temporizes.
Inscribed
[Doolittle, Hilda]. H.D. Hippolytus Temporizes. A Play in Three Acts. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company…, 1927.
8vo.; bookplate, “Craigwood,” on the rear blank; three-quarter salmon-colored paper-covered boards, with decorative gold and black pattern; black cloth spine; stamped in gilt; remainder of library sticker at the heel of the spine; original black cardboard sleeve, hinges cracked; edgeworn; printed label, and library label, to spine. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition; printed in April, 1927 at the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts; 550 copies, 50 of these hors commerce.
A presentation copy, inscribed: To Merrill Moore / from / H.D. / Xmas 1937; / (Another curio for your shelves: finished London 1925 from rough notes made in Corfu, spring 1920.) With Moore’s bookplate affixed to front pastedown; and with the portion of the brown paper wrapper in which H.D. originally shipped it affixed opposite the copyright page; it reads, in her hand: From: H.D. Aldington / 4D / 4E / 64th St. / N.Y. City. With two minor emendations by H.D. in pencil: On page 103 she has crossed out a stage direction, and on page one, written in “chants” for the misprint, “charts.” Moore was a psychoanalyst – he set up a private practice in Boston, taught at Harvard Medical School, and was an early associate of Freud’s; he was also a poet, and a member of the Nashville-based literary group called the Fugitives. Moore might have been associated with H.D. through either aspect of his life; she was analyzed by Freud, and moved in the same literary circles as Moore did.
Hippolytus Temporizes is an original play based on Greek models; an “Argument” printed before the beginning of Act I sets up the ensuing action; it begins: “This is the familiar story of Theseus of Athens. Hippolytus, his son and child of Hippolyta, inflames a later wife, the Cretan princess, Phaedra, in her palace outside Troezen in Attica. Theseus, King of Athens, finds his rival in his own son, the step-son of his foreign queen.”
(#8766)
Print Inquire