DAVIDSON, John. Plays. Being: An Unhistorical Pastoral. A Romantic Farce. Bruce a Chronicle Play. Smith a Tragic Farce. And Scaramouch in Naxos a Pantomime.

An Early Copy

DAVIDSON, John. Plays. Being: An Unhistorical Pastoral. A Romantic Farce. Bruce a Chronicle Play. Smith a Tragic Farce. And Scaramouch in Naxos a Pantomime. [London: Ballantyne Press for] John Lane and Elkin Mathews and Chicago: Stone and Kimball. 1894.

8vo. Publisher’s bevelled plum cloth, spine lettered in gilt, gilt masked Pierrot by Beardsley to upper board; pp. [8], 294, 14 (advertisements), [2]; frontispiece by Beardsley; slight wear to spine ends; light browning at head; but a very good copy; contemporary Blackwell’s ticket to front pastedown, 1897 booklabel of W.A. Marsden to front pastedown, with manuscript key to the frontispiece (presumably by Marsden) loosely inserted.

First edition, one of 500 copies printed for distribution in England, with a frontispiece and title-page vignette by Beardsley (repeated to upper board), from the library of W.A. Marsden, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum.

Scottish playwright, novelist, and translator John Davidson (1857–1909) was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, a friend of Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats, and an influence on T.S. Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Wallace Stevens. Davidson committed suicide by drowning and had expressed during his life that none of his unpublished works should be brought to light posthumously and that no biography should be written. Beardsley had also produced a frontispiece for Davidson’s 1895 Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender.

Loosely inserted is a one-page manuscript key, with drawings, of individual figures represented in the frontispiece, thought to depict Mabel Beardsley, Henry Harland, Oscar Wilde, Sir Augustus Harris, Richard Le Gallienne, and the dancer Adeline Genée. The satyr-like figure on the left ‘partly conceals the figure of Mabel Beardsley, beside whom is Oscar Wilde with his legs thonged together. The innuendo may be that Mabel is interested in Wilde, or the reverse, but safe from him because his legs are tied together (in other words he has become heterosexually impotent) [...] The landscape details are remarkable for their date, being almost abstractions’ (Reade). ‘According to Reade and Dickinson, a small dot found on the back of Genée’s skirt is “part of the lineblock” and may denote an early copy of the book’ (Samuels Lasner).

Provenance: with the booklabel of Wilfred Alexander Marsden (1878–1949) of New College, Oxford, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum from 1930 to 1943. Marsden was the owner of the Johnson manuscript, an important eighteenth-century transcription of Rubens’s lost Italian sketchbook, sold at Sotheby’s (23–24 March 1970, lot 179), purchased by Maggs for Count Antoine Seilern, and subsequently bequeathed to the Courtauld.

Gertner Zatlin 331–32; Reade 317–18; Samuels Lasner 58.

SKU: 2126084