A HAUNTED HOUSE
ADDISON, Joseph, [and Giulio RUCELLAI, translator].
Il Tamburo parafrasi in versi sciolti della commedia tradotta in prosa dal Signor des Touches dall’originale inglese di M.r Addisson [sic].
Florence, Andrea Bonducci, 1750.
8vo, pp. xxix, [1, blank], 114; bound without blank leaf 2¶8; engraved frontispiece signed ‘J. Verkruijs’, engraved vignette to title, title printed in red and black; a few small marks, title and frontispiece slightly foxed, small marginal chip to frontispiece; but a very good copy in contemporary vellum over boards, contrasting gilt morocco lettering-pieces; boards bowed, two minute wormholes at head of spine, a few scuffs; bookplate of Thomas Gaisford to front pastedown.
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Il Tamburo parafrasi in versi sciolti della commedia tradotta in prosa dal Signor des Touches dall’originale inglese di M.r Addisson [sic].
First edition in Italian of Joseph Addison’s 1715 The Drummer; or, the Haunted House, translated from Destouches’s French prose translation of 1737 into Italian hendecasyllabic blank verse.
The politician and essayist Joseph Addison (1672–1719) bolstered his ‘stalled dramatic career … with the production of a comedy, The drummer, put on by Steele, now manager at Drury Lane, on 10 March 1716’ (ODNB), and in 1762 was revived at Drury Lane and Covent Garden; in the same year, Philippe Néricault Destouches’ French prose translation of the play (Le tambour nocturne, ou le mari devin, published 1737) was performed for the first time at the Théâtre Français. Here, the Baronessa d’Arco (originally Lady Trueman), under the assumption that her husband had been killed in battle, is pursued by two suitors, who are frightened off by eerie drumming in the household, later revealed to be not the work of poltergeists but of the Barone d’Arco (Sir George Trueman), still very much alive.
The present translation is the work of the Florentine politician and playwright Giulio Rucellai (1702–1778), Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo’s minister of ecclesiastical affairs and the dedicatee of Goldoni’s Locandiera, who perhaps encountered Addison’s work through his involvement with the English Masonic lodge in Florence. Rucellai’s ‘utilitarian perspective’ in his politics ‘also emerges in the preface to his translation of [The Drummer], in which he states that the measure of the virtuousness of one’s actions lies in their utility to society’ (DBI, trans.). Here, he takes some liberties with the names, e.g. changing Vellum (Sir Trueman’s steward) to Don Fidenzio (Monsieur Pince in Destouches’s translation).
Provenance: with the bookplate of Thomas Gaisford (1779–1855), classicist, Dean of Christ Church Oxford, Regius Professor of Greek, curator of the Bodleian Library, and delegate of the Clarendon Press.
We find one copy in the UK (BL), and seven in the US (Berkeley, Duke, Getty, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Texas A&M).
Melzi III, p. 124.
