Fables Ancient and Modern

John Dryden,

Fables Ancient and Modern

London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, at Shakespear’s-Head over-against Katharine-Street in the Strand, MDCCXXI. [1721]

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$250.00

Greatly admired throughout the 18th Century. Here in the third edition.

The volume(s) measure about 17 cm. by 10.5 cm. by 3 cm.

Each leaf measures about 165 mm. by 95 mm.

The full title reads:

Fables Ancient and Modern; Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, and Chaucer: with original poems. By Mr. Dryden. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, at Shakespear’s-Head over-against Katharine-Street in the Strand, MDCCXXI. [1721]

The volume is paginated as follows: [Lx], 345, [3] p.

The volume collates as follows: A – R12

The Third Edition. Conforms to Macdonald 37b. Frontispiece [A1] = ill.

First published in 1700 in either regular or large paper folio. Second edition in this 8vo format in 1713.

ESTC: T124907 Macdonald 37b

The Volume is in Very Good Condition. Bound In Cambridge style panelled English calf, with the spine divided into five compartments by four raised bands, with a red morocco letter-piece in the second compartment from the top, and with board edges git tooled and leaf edges red speckled. Externally the board and spine are lightly scuffed in general, with chipping to the head and tail of the spine, and with the board corners bumped.

Internally the leaves are generally clean and well margined, with some mild marginal toning and creasing, with little else in the way of stains or tears.

Of the ‘Fables, Ancient and Modern’

After the deposition of his patron James II in 1688, John Dryden turned to translation to provide himself with a steady income. Dryden s education at the Westminster School had provided him with an excellent grounding in translation, which was a conventional exercise at the time.

Fables, Ancient and Modern contains translations of the First Book of Homer’s Iliad, eight selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, three of Geoffrey Chaucer s Canterbury Tales (and an imitation from the Prologue on “The Character of a Good Parson”), the later medieval poem The Flower and the Leaf, which he thought was by Chaucer, and three stories from Boccaccio. The volume also contains a number of Dryden’s own works, including “Alexander s Feast” and an impressive preface in which he lauds Chaucer, calling him the Father of English poetry . All the translations are in his characteristic heroic couplet, which uses alexandrines and triplets to vary the movement. Dryden aimed to increase the English people s literary reputation by appropriating the greatest traditions in literature and developing them into new genres. The English public were eager recipients of his translations, and saw them as connecting English literature with the great works of the past.

The Fables were greatly admired throughout the 18th century, and their form and versification were imitated by John Keats in “Lamia.” An interesting feature of the preface is that Dryden did not understand Chaucer’s Middle English prosody and dismissed his versification as irregular, because Middle English pronunciation was not properly understood at the time. In fact, since Dryden was working with Thomas Speght’s extremely corrupt edition of Chaucer (printed overleaf from the translations in the California edition), and “The Flower and the Leaf” is prosodically unlike the poems by Chaucer, he couldn’t possibly have scanned Chaucer even if he had assigned the correct Middle English values.

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