Title: Selected Plays
Author: William Shakespeare, Henry Fuseli (illus)
Publisher: The Franklin Library, 1981
ISBN: –
Condition: Hardcover, black leather. Except for a small bump on back board, and very minor wear on edge gilt, this is like new. No marks, no writings, no signs of previous ownership – pages clean and crisp, appears unread. The illustrations of Fuseli, from his famous Shakespeare Gallery, are spectacularly rendered. 660 pages.
Note: this book is very heavy, and overseas shipping will cost extra.
This book features:
- Full black leather binding
- Genuine 22k gold gilt to all edges, front design, spine, and back
- Marbled endsheets
- Satin bookmark, sewn-in
- Hubbed spine with 5 raised bands
- Smyth-sewn binding for durability
- Premium acid-neutral archival paper that will not yellow
Contents:
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Othello, the Moor of Venice
King Lear
Macbeth
The Tempest
About the illustrator (from wikipedia):
As a painter, Fuseli favoured the supernatural. He pitched everything on an ideal scale, believing a certain amount of exaggeration necessary in the higher branches of historical painting. In this theory he was confirmed by the study of Michelangelo’s works and the marble statues of the Monte Cavallo, which, when at Rome, he liked to contemplate in the evening, relieved against a murky sky or illuminated by lightning. The violent and intemperate action which he often displays, in the conventional wisdom, destroys the grand effect of many of his pieces. A striking illustration of this occurs in his famous picture of “Hamlet breaking from his Attendants to follow the Ghost”: Hamlet, it has been said, looks as though he would burst his clothes with convulsive cramps in all his muscles.
On the other hand, his paintings are never either languid or cold. His figures are full of life and earnestness, and seem to have an object in view which they follow with intensity. Like Rubens he excelled in the art of setting his figures in motion. Though the lofty and terrible was his proper sphere, Fuseli had a fine perception of the ludicrous. The grotesque humour of his fairy scenes, especially those taken from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, is in its way not less remarkable than the poetic power of his more ambitious works.
