SHAKESPEARE, William [William D'avenant]. Macbeth, a Tragedy: With all the Alterations, Amendments, Additions, and New Songs. As it is now Acted at the Duke's Theatre. (THE SECOND QUARTO EDITION AND THE FIRST DAVENANT EDITION - 1674)

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SHAKESPEARE, William [William D'avenant]. Macbeth, a Tragedy: With all the Alterations, Amendments, Additions, and New Songs. As it is now Acted at the Duke's Theatre. (THE SECOND QUARTO EDITION AND THE FIRST DAVENANT EDITION - 1674)
"Double double, toyl and trouble;
Fire burn, and Cauldron bubble."
.

AUTHOR: SHAKESPEARE, William [William D'avenant]

TITLE: Macbeth, a Tragedy: With all the Alterations, Amendments, Additions, and New Songs. As it is now Acted at the Duke's Theatre.

PUBLISHER: London: Printed for P. Chetwin, 1674.

DESCRIPTION: THE SECOND QUARTO EDITION AND THE FIRST DAVENANT EDITION . 1 vol., 17 cm x 21.7 cm, (ii)66pp., small minor paper repair to extreme lower corner of A2 & D2. Bound in contemporary full paneled calf.

CONDITION: Expertly rebacked, pastedowns and endpapers renewed, internally clean and bright, a nice un-washed copy in for the most part a contemporary binding.

REFERENCE: Wing S-2930.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Macbeth first appeared in the 1623 collected First Folio of Shakespeare, but was not published separately until the first quarto edition of 1673. Exceedingly rare the census locates only 3 or 4 copies in private hands.

By 1673 Davenant’s version was enjoying theatrical success in London and in response to this the first quarto edition of the play was issued, which included three additional witches’ songs from Davenant’s production. In 1674 the first full edition of Davenant’s text appeared and both Philip Chetwin and A. Clark published quarto editions. Both of these printings include revised versions of several speeches, two new scenes which were entirely Davenant’s own creation, and the three witches' songs. Even so, compared to other early editors, Davenant was relatively faithful to Shakespeare’s text. This Chetwin edition is often thought to precede the Clark edition issued the same year by a matter of weeks or months, making the present copy the first Davenant edition and the second quarto edition overall. Both 1674 editions, and indeed all Restoration quartos of Macbeth, are extraordinarily rare. Pforzheimer did not own anything earlier than the 1687 Davenant reprint, and only a handful of 17th-century printings have appeared on the market in 25 years.