Calf bound but with a later spine, a 1633 [first?] edition of the lawyer turned polemicist and pamphleteer, William Prynne's lengthy attack on the immorality of the theatre and the manners of the age generally, Histriomastix: the Player's Scourge or Actor's Tragedy, was sold for £775.
Perceived slights in this work against Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria, saw Prynne brought before the Star Chamber, where he was expelled from Lincoln's Inn, had his Oxford degree revoked, was fined £5000, sentenced to life imprisonment and ordered to have his ears cut off in the pillory.
Undeterred, Prynne carried on writing whilst held in the Tower of London and in 1637 was fined a further £5000, had what was still left of his ears removed and was branded on the cheeks with the letters SL for seditious libeller - though he claimed it meant Stigmata Laudis, a reference to Archbishop Laud, whom he saw as his chief persecutor and whom he continued to attack and defame when, in 1640, his sentence was declared illegal and he was released from prison by order of the Long Parliament.
Prynne was at first a leading defender of the Parliamentary cause but in later years annoyed both the government and the army and then went on to assert the rights of Charles II. In his last years, he was appointed Keeper of the Records at the Tower.
Bound in half green morocco and marbled boards, a ten-vol. 1832 [first] edition of John Genest's ,i>Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 made £645.
Sold at £345 in Eley was a playbill for an amateur performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor given at the Theatre Royal (in aid of funds hoping to endow a permanent curatorship at Shakespeare's House) in June 1848 by Charles Dickens and some of his friends and family - among the former, Mark Lemon, John Forster, George Cruikshank and John Leech.
