SUBVERSIVE SHAKESPEARE

Omylowé dle Shakespeara wzdělaná weselohra Bolemjrem Izborským.

Prague, Jozefa Fetterlowá, ‘in the Archbishop’s Printing House at the Seminary’, 1823.

8vo, pp. 82, [2 (advertisements)]; a very good copy, cut flush in early cloth-backed marbled boards with patterned paper sides; nineteenth-century ink stamp of Jan Šťastný to title.

£1100

Approximately:
US $1424€1309

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First edition in Czech, very rare, of A Comedy of Errors, freely translated by Antonín Marek (1785–1877), one of the earliest appearances of Shakespeare in the language, preceded only by a very rare translation of Macbeth by Karel Ignác Thám (Makbet, 1786), which was staged in the Bouda or ‘shed’, a wooden theatre constructed in Wenceslas Square, and two synopses in prose of The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet (1822).

‘The Napoleonic wars in the early years of the [nineteenth] century brought a relapse in cultural activities (especially after 1815 when the anti-Napoleonic and profoundly anti-modern Holy Alliance was signed between Prussia, Russia, and Austria) affecting all of Austria’s dominions, including the Czech lands … Shakespeare ironically became a dangerous representative of a degenerate Western culture – one that destroyed the old order and brought about Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’ (Drábek, in Shakespeare in Prague: Imagining the Bard in the Heart of Europe (2017), p. 15).

It is likely for this reason that the present edition was written under the pseudonym of Bolemir Izborský (Marek’s works on logic, conversely, were published under his own name); the clergyman, lexicographer, poet, educator, pan-Slavic philosopher, and proponent of the Czech National Revival Antonín Marek (1785–1877) translated Ovid, Schiller, and several Russian ethnographic works into Czech.

Provenance: with the stamp of Czech composer and cellist Jan Šťastný (c 1764–1830); he was a member of the Prague theatre orchestra and was music director at Nuremberg and Mannheim.

Not in Library Hub; OCLC records copies at Czech National Library and Folger only.

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