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BACON, Sir Francis. Sylva Sylvarum or, a naturall Historie in ten Centuries … Published after the Author’s Death by W. Rawley Doctor in Divinitie, one of his Majesty’s Chaplaines. Hereunto is now added an alphabeticall Table of the principall Things contained in the whole Worke. London, Printed by John Havil for William Lee, and are to be sold by John Williams. 1635.

Folio, pp. [24], 260, [32], 47, [3], with the additional engraved title-page (dated 1631), and an engraved frontispiece portrait, but wanting the final blank; small portions neatly cut out of portrait border to accentuate THE trompe-l’oeil effect, small tear at foot of title-page; somewhat foxed and soiled; nineteenth-century half-calf, red morocco label; inscription to head of the leaf of dedication to Charles I: ‘Thomas Killigreu. Ams[?]. 1636’.

Fourth edition. Little is known of the early life of Thomas Killigrew, though Pepys recounts that he frequented the Red Bull playhouse in Clerkenwell as a boy. He was evidently a page to Charles I by 1632 and then became part of Queen Henrietta Maria’s household. As a courtier, he must have known Bacon’s editor William Rawley, then royal chaplain. In 1635-6 he was travelling in Europe with Walter Montague, the Queen’s favourite; the spring of 1636 saw him in Italy, where he wrote two plays, Claricilla and The Princess. He then returned to England and, on 29 June, he married Celia Crofts, a maid of honour to the Queen. Perhaps he purchased the present volume in Amsterdam en route home that spring. Killigrew’s signature always seems to look like ‘Killigreu’ although perhaps a final ‘w’ is intended (Greg, English Literary Autographs, plate XXV; Pierpont Morgan Library, British Literary Manuscripts, Series I, no. 44).

Killigrew’s first play, The Prisoners, was performed by Her Majesty’s Servants at the Phoenix in the year of his return, though his dramatic star was not to rise until after the Restoration, when he was rewarded for his service to Charles II in exile, with a monopoly (shared with William Davenant) of London theatre management. His company, the reconstituted King’s Men, revived Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shirley at the Theatre Royal, and introduced Dryden, Wycherley and Killigrew himself to the restored Caroline stage. His Comedies and Tragedies, the earliest ‘grand’ theatrical book of the Restoration, was published in 1664.

Gibson 174; STC 1172.

£1850

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