Workes

London: Imprinted at London by Will Stansby; Printed for Richard Meighen; no publisher stated for third volume, 1616, 1637,1640. Three volumes. First Edition; small-paper issue. Volume 1; third state title page; bound in contemporary (?) full brushed leather with tooling to front and rear panels; rebacked with spine laid down; title page backed; some worm-holing to upper right margin of 18 preliminary pages, else very good. Volume 2 lacks the title page; full contemporary leather, rebacked with the original spine laid down; some staining to a few pages on the bottom margin; about very good. Volume 3 has a typographical error not mentioned in Pforzheimer, the imprint of Magnetick Lady reading M.CD.XI instead of M.DC.XI. Full contemporary leather; rebacked with the original spine laid down and with some loss to the bottom edge of the front two blanks; very good. All volumes are housed in matching slipcases. Jonson was the most prominent contemporary of Shakespeare, whose theater produced some of Jonson’s plays and who acted in at least one of them. Jonson’s posthumous reputation sank as Shakespeare’s rose, but the twentieth-century saw a positive reappraisal of his work, led in part by T.S. Eliot.