Sibling Rivalry and Surprising Sources
CORNEILLE, Pierre.
Nicomède tragedie. Rouen, Laurens Maurry, and Paris, Guillaume de Luyne, 1653.
12mo, pp. [viii], 80; woodcut vignette to title; title dusty, else a good copy; bound in contemporary limp vellum, later lettering to spine; modern collector’s bookplate to front pastedown.
Rare second edition (first 1651) of Corneille’s tragedy of sibling rivalry and the conflict of political and aristocratic ideals, set in Rome in the second century BC.
It was written after Corneille (1606–1684) moved to Paris in 1647, and the play was first staged at the height of the Fronde rebellion, after which he wrote nothing for the stage until the end of the decade. In his address to the reader, Corneille explains that after twenty-one plays and 40,000 lines of verse, it had become difficult to find any new stories without going off the beaten track, so the source for this play is a short passage in Justinus.
Nicomède was first published in quarto by the same publisher in 1651. This 12mo second edition is extremely scarce, and last appeared at auction in 1962 (this copy). There was also a Paris edition in the same year printed by Courbé, probably a piracy as de Luyne had the copyright.
OCLC finds two copies in the US (Michigan, Yale), and none in the UK. Not in Library Hub.
USTC 6104005; Tchemerzine IV 78; cf. Brunet II, col. 285 and Cioranescu I 20735 for the first edition.