PETRARCH AND THE ENGLISH SONNET SEQUENCES

First edition, first printing. Review copy, with the publisher's review slip and some information concerning UK distribution neatly pasted to the front endpaper. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper reproducing an illustration from Charles Sorel's 'Le berger extravagant, 1654'. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp, the contents clean except for a handful of light marginal pencil notes. Minor creasing to to upper outer edges of a few early pages (the result of a small dink to the page block). In the unclipped dustwrapper, rubbed, nicked and creased to spine tips and corners, otherwise clean and bright. A nice copy of an uncommon volume.

Notably hard to find, Roche's study is one of a handful of essential volumes on the origins and development of the English sonnet-sequence (Roche is perhaps best known as a Spenser scholar and editor of the Penguin 'Fairie Queene'). Beginning with the exemplary Petrarch and his 'Canzoniere', Roche covers the full range of English sequences, from the well-known (Shakespeare, Sidney, Greville, Daniel) to those less so (Anne Locke, Barnabe Barnes, Nicholas Breton, Henry Constable, and others), his deeply informed readings uncovering mythic subtexts and numerological principles underlying structures both within and between sequences.