Added to your basket:
Roxana tragaedia olim Cantabrigiae, acta in Col. Trin. Nunc primum in lucem edita.

Checkout now

The pirated first edition (the first authorized text followed later in the same year) of a neo-Latin verse drama in the manner of Seneca, by one of the foremost Latinists of his day.

A loose adaptation of La Dalida by Luigi Groto, Roxana is thought to have been first performed at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1580s or 1590s, when Alabaster was a fellow there, but it was not published until 1632. It achieved the feat of ‘turning a bad play into a good one by recasting it in the mold of Senecan tragedy, replacing Groto’s flaccid turgidity with neoclassical economy and urgency’ (Dana Sutton, online hypertext edition), and has had perhaps the greatest reputation of any play from the entire corpus of academic drama performed at Oxford and Cambridge in the sixteenth century. The quality of Roxana’s Latin verse received particular approbation from Samuel Johnson – ‘If we produced any thing worthy of notice before the elegies of Milton, it was perhaps Alabaster’s Roxana’.

The Elizabethan poet and playwright William Alabaster (1568–1640) was lavishly praised by Spenser in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again for his incomplete Latin epic in honour of Queen Elizabeth, ‘Elisaeis’, but he is best known now for his manuscript English sonnets of 1597-8. He has the unusual double distinction of having been imprisoned for apostasy (he was converted by a Jesuit when he accompanied the Earl of Essex on his 1596 expedition to Cadiz), and having a work put on the 1610 Index librorum prohibitorum.

ESTC S100480; STC 249; Greg L11a.

You may also be interested in...

WITH AN AUTOGRAPH LETTER YARRELL, William.

A History of British Fishes … illustrated by nearly 400 Woodcuts.

First collected editions, with an autograph letter on the Hebridal smelt from the species’ discoverer. Published serially from 1835 to 1836, Yarrell’s History of British Fishes was reprinted within a year, and followed soon after by Thomas Bell’s British Reptiles in 1839 and his own British Birds in 1843 published by van Voorst and together forming a comprehensive survey of British wildlife. Though noted for his careful observations, Yarrell is here corrected on several points in an autograph letter to the antiquarian Adam Sim (1805–1868) from William Euing (1788–1874), who had discovered the Hebridal smelt (first included in the Supplement) in November 1837 and notes ‘I mean to write to Mr Y. and send him my dried specimen, from which he will be able to rectify the mistakes if the work should go to a second edition’.

Read more

TASSO, Torquato.

Il rogo di Corinna, et la fenice ...

A strikingly bound copy of Deuchino’s editions of four pastoral plays and epic poems by Tasso.

Read more