PLAYS, POEMS, AND MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS ASSOCIATED WITH GEORGE VILLIERS, SECOND DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM: Complete in Two Volumes.

First edition, first printing. Two volumes. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrappers. A very near fine set, presenting as unread, the bindings square and firm, the contents clean throughout. There are a couple of small marks to the lower page block edge of Vol. I. In the dustwrappers, fine except for a little surface dust and a mark to the spine of Vol. II. Altogether, a very sharp, attractive set.

Four years before this magnificent set emerged, Robert Hume published an essay on the problems associated with editing Buckingham. The title of that essay, 'Editing a Nebulous Author', as well as the title given to the set four years later ('Writings Associated with…') sum up the problem. Even 'The Rehearsal', Buckingham's most famous work (a burlesque send-up of Dryden's dramatic writings) is beset with problems of attribution. No one quite knows what Buckingham's working methods were, which bits he wrote alone, and which in collaboration. Hume and Love treat this challenge in "a cheerfully inclusive" manner and the volume is not just a wonderfully various collection of Restoration Plays, Poems, Essays, and Letters, but an entertaining display of editorial guile and virtuosity. It was the final major project of Harold Love, author of 'Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England' (1993), and editor of earlier definitive editions of Southerne and Rochester. "What is outstanding about this edition is its intellectual generosity: the editors share their sense of the intractable nature of the problems they have had to face and are never ashamed to admit the limits of their knowledge and of what can be known." (H. R. Woudhuysen, 'The Library', 2011)