The Historie of the World.

a source for Shakespeare

'Over and over again it will be found that the source of some ancient piece of wisdom is Pliny.' (PMM 5)

A handsome first edition, first issue of Philemon Holland's renowned English translation of Pliny's Natural History. The most popular of Holland's translations, it had never before been printed in English, and would not be attempted again for another 250 years.

One of the greatest translators of the Elizabethan age, Holland's Pliny was an important source for Shakespeare. 'In Othello's allusion to the Pontic Sea, Shakespeare was clearly drawing upon Pliny's Historie as translated by Holland… Similarly Pliny has also been cited as a source for Othello's reference to the "medicinal gum" of "the Arabian trees"' (Payne, Search for Meaning, 63), and many trace Caliban in The Tempest to Holland's Pliny.

'The importance of Pliny lay not so much that he was an inexhaustible source for monsters, eclipses, and the stranger habits of all created things, but that in the pages of Philemon Holland's translation Shakespeare found that emphasis on Nature which he employed and re-interpreted in the tragedy' (Evans, The Language of Shakespeare's Plays).

First edition in English, first issue (with the Islip imprint); 2 vols, folio (30.5 x 20.7 cm); 2 title pages each with woodcut allegorical device, woodcut head- and tailpieces, decorative initials, last leaf with errata on recto and colophon on verso, one or two instances of early marginalia; lacking first blank leaf in each volume, scattered light foxing and staining, a few marginal open and closed tears, scattered small rust holes costing a few letters, faint dampstaining to a few gatherings; late 18th-century half calf over marbled paper-covered boards, edges speckled red, sometime rebacked with original spines laid down, gilt tooling to spines, red morocco title labels to spines lettered in gilt; a handsome copy.

STC 20029.5; Pforzheimer 496; ESTC S115918; Brueggemann, 670; Lowndes, 1885; cf. PMM 5.