Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

8vo (159 x 95 mm). (Light spotting and browning throughout, occasional light penciling in margins.) Contemporary half calf, marbled boards (upper cover detached, rear joint starting, some losses to spine ends). Provenance: former institutional library bookplate, mostly removed.

"THE FIRST KNOWN AMERICAN PUBLICATION ON SHAKESPEARE" (Jaggard). 

In the decades after the American Revolution, Shakespeare’s voice echoed through the shaping of a new nation. His plays—full of mad kings, usurpers, and questions of power—resonated with Americans who had just toppled a monarchy and were grappling with what freedom and self-government should look like. Both patriots and loyalists borrowed his lines to make their cases: newspapers riffed on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (“Be taxt, or not be taxt, that is the question”), and theater companies, even in war-torn cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, staged his works for audiences hungry for drama that reflected their own uncertainties and ideals. By the 1790s, Shakespeare had become more than an English import; Americans claimed his words as their own, using them in tavern debates and on the public stage. 

In his work, A Philosophical Analysis, Richardson delves into the personalities of major Shakespearean figures and provides an appended essay critiquing Shakespeare's perceived faults. First published in Glasgow in 1774, the work went through several editions before being published in post-Revolutionary Philadelphia—marking the first Shakespeare publication to be printed in America. It wasn’t until a few years later in 1795 that the first American-printed edition of Shakespeare’s complete works was published.

RARE: according to online records, this edition has not appeared at auction in over a century (Anderson Galleries, 1918). Jaggard, p.263.