PLAUTUS.
M. Accius Plautus ex fide, atque auctoritate complurium librorum manuscriptorum opera Dionys. Lambini Monstroliensis emendatus: ab eodemque commentariis explicatus, et nunc primum in lucem editus. Adiecta sunt Plautina loca … Additi quoque sunt duo indices copiosissimi …
Paris, Jean Le Blanc for Jean Macé, 1577 [– October 1576].
Folio, pp. [viii], 1118, [78]; large woodcut device to title, woodcut initials and headpieces; title and following leaf creased, small paperflaws to outer margin of title, small wormhole up to p. 120 (without loss of sense), occasional light marginal dampstaining, overall a very good copy in contemporary mottled sheep, spine gilt in compartments with gilt red morocco lettering-piece, edges stained red, marbled endpapers; somewhat rubbed with a few scuffs to boards, small loss at head of spine, small losses to front endpapers; erased inscription at head of title, eighteenth-century ink ownership inscription ‘T. Gale’ to title, eighteenth-century manuscript list of the plays with page references to front free endpaper verso.
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M. Accius Plautus ex fide, atque auctoritate complurium librorum manuscriptorum opera Dionys. Lambini Monstroliensis emendatus: ab eodemque commentariis explicatus, et nunc primum in lucem editus. Adiecta sunt Plautina loca … Additi quoque sunt duo indices copiosissimi …
Reissue of the 1576 first edition of the plays of Plautus edited by the great French classical scholar Denis Lambin (1520–1572) and completed after his death by the Parisian professor of Greek, Jacques Hélie (d. 1590).
Full of ‘exuberant word-play, coarse jokes, alliteration, puns, and boisterous humour’, Plautus’ twenty surviving plays ‘are almost the only evidence we have for the Latin language at that period. They were greatly admired in the late republic and under the early emperors … Plautus was rediscovered and widely translated in the Renaissance, and his influence is traceable in much sixteenth-century English comedy. Henry VIII had two of the comedies performed to entertain the French ambassador in 1526. Shakespeare used the plot of the Menaechmi in The Comedy of Errors (1594), and Molière’s Harpagon in L’Avare (1668) is taken from Euclio in Aulularia’ (Oxford Companion to Classical Literature).
‘Of this admirable edition, Lambinus lived to finish only the first twelve comedies; but his colleague, Helius, professor of Greek, completed the work, partly by transcribing what remained in Lambinus’s hand-writing on the subsequent comedies, and partly by the insertion of his own notes, and emendations of the text. In forming the edition, many MSS and ancient publications were consulted’ (Dibdin, An Introduction to the Knowledge of rare and valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics (1827) vol. II, p. 310).
Adams P-1501; USTC 170374.
