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A very fine, crisp copy in contemporary blind-ruled calf with minor wear to the head of the spine and the very bottom of the hinge. The engraved frontispiece portrait (A1v) is signed: "W. Marshall fecit." With separate title pages for "Poems &c.", "Letters to Divers Eminent Personages" and "An Account of Religion" with continuous register and pagination. Separate dated title pages with continuous register and pagination for "Aglaura. Presented . in Black-Fryers" and "Aglaura. Represented at the Court". The two remaining works, "The Goblins, A Comedy" and "Brennoralt, A Tragedy" with separate dated title pages, register, and pagination. First edition of the most important volume of Suckling s work, comprising his poems, letters, the tragedies Aglaura (1637, rev. 1638) and Brennoralt (late 1639?), and the comedy The Goblins (1638 1641), and the "An Account of Religion." "Suckling made his mark as a poet, playwright, and belletrist, but he was a writer mainly by avocation, and by second nature. He was first and last a wit and a courtier to Charles I, being occupied mainly as a gentleman officer, socio-political observer, gamester, amorist, and marital fortune seeker often impetuously and not always successfully. "First known as a gallant and gamester, Suckling became famous also as a writer. He somehow found time to write much, and often well, in a range of genres, his uvre extending to seventy-eight poems (c.1624 1641); four plays, The Sad One (c.1632, unfinished), Aglaura (1637, rev. 1638), The Goblins (1638 1641), and Brennoralt (late 1639?); An Account of Religion by Reason (1637); several political tracts; and over fifty surviving letters, a few of literary genre and most of literary quality. His earliest known writings are religious poems written probably about 1624, when he was fifteen: St Thomas figures in two of these, and the concern with faith and doubt anticipates An Account of Religion. "The years 1637 and 1638 were Suckling's literary anni mirabiles. In 1637 he wrote the tragedy Aglaura, the Account of Religion, and The Wits ( A Sessions of the Poets in Fragmenta aurea, 1646), with its witty but also probing fictional contest between Davenant, Thomas Carew, Ben Jonson, and others; the queen is present, and Apollo the god of poetry himself is judge. No one has better expressed Suckling's character than himself in this poem in a genre of his own invention the trial for the bays imitated by many, including Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Suckling next was call'd, but did not appear, And strait one whisperd Apollo in's ear, That of all men living he cared not for't, He loved not the Muses so well as his sport; And prized black eyes, or a lucky hit At bowls, above all the Trophies of Wit. ( A sessions of the Poets , 73 8) "While The Wits was being sung to the king on a hunting expedition to the New Forest in August 1637, only 60 miles away Suckling was writing his Account of Religion in Bath, where he had had a Cart-load of Bookes carried downe … 'Twas as pleasant a journey as ever men had; in the height of a long Peace and luxury, and in the Venison Season (Brief Lives, 289) the last such retreat for Suckling and many another, after 1638. "Suckling's other major poem, in the novel genre of rustic epithalamion, is A Ballade upon a Wedding ( I tell thee Dick, where I have been ), written probably for the marriage of John, Lord Lovelace, and Lady Anne Wentworth on 11 July 1638. In this, a fashionable town wedding is described by a cottage rustic in country terms and perspective but also with sensitivity, perceptiveness, and a keen levelling humour, a sustained balancing act between dramatis personae and poet especially deft in conclusion: what the bride and groom did at bedtime: who can tell? But I beleeve it was no more Than thou and I have done before with Bridget, and with Nell. "Rough times ended Suckling s life prematurely: heir at eighteen and prodigal as soon, he died at thirty-two in Paris, pennile.
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