Venus and Adonis, tenth edition

The tenth edition of Venus and Adonis, like the eighth and ninth, bears an imprint claiming the book was printed for William Leake in 1602; however, it seems that it was not printed for Leake until 1610. There are no surviving full copies of this edition; only a fragmentary title page. Harry Farr, in a landmark 1923 essay, as well as the editors of the Short Title Catalogue, provisionally assign it this later date because its text is derived from a different witness, or source text, than the Raworth editions and because it was printed for William Leake, possibly by Humphrey Lownes (based on type and ornament evidence).

Although Shakespeare is now known primarily as a playwright, in his own time he was equally revered as the author of Venus and Adonis, first printed in 1593, and Lucrece, his two sensationally successful Ovidian narrative poems. Venus and Adonis appeared in more printed editions than any other work of vernacular poetry in his lifetime, and was published twice as many times as his most successful play, Henry IV Part 1. 

The title page of this edition survives because the bookseller and antiquary John Bagford (1650/51-1716) bound it into an octavo volume of “printed Title-pages, engraved Frontispieces, Portraits of Authors, &c.,” one of nine such volumes of printed fragments compiled by him. Bagford’s papers were acquired by the collector Edward Harley, 2nd earl of Oxford and earl of Mortimer, and became part of the foundational Harley collection when the British Museum opened in 1753.

To learn more about the plot and early printing history of Venus and Adonis, please visit the Folger Shakespeare Library's Shakespeare's Works; to read a modernized edition of the poem, see the Folger Shakespeare edition.