Los Siete Libros de la Diana …

Anvers [Antwerp]: Iuan [Juan] Stelsio, 1561. First Antwerp edition, fifth edition overall. 12mo. Woodcut device on title and recto of final leaf. [3], 230, [2] ll. COLLATION: A-T12 V4. Contemporary vellum; A8 trimmed with some loss to text at fore-edge margin due to misaligned imposition, running titles trimmed First Antwerp edition, fifth edition overall, of this foundational and wildly popular pastoral prose romance and Shakespeare sourcebook, written in Spanish by the Portuguese author Jorge de Montemayor (c.1520-1561). First published in 1559 in Valencia, Diana "holds the distinction of being the first fully developed Iberian romance of the sixteenth century" (Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, 2005, p. 187). Diana was one of the most popular works of early modern Europe, running to dozens of editions in Spanish throughout the second half of the 16th century, as well as numerous translations. The first English translation, by Bartholomew Young, was published in 1598. Diana’s plot, a complicated rustic masquerade set in a fantastical Arcadian world populated by nymphs, giants and other mythical creatures, “centers on the shepherd Sireno's search for a cure to love's misery, occasioned by the beautiful shepherdess Diana who has forsaken him to marry another shepherd, Delio” (ibid). Works inspired by Diana include Sidney’s Arcadia, Cervantes’ first prose work, La Galatea (Cervantes also mentions Diana in Don Quixote), and Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, which borrows its cross-dressing love-triangle plot from Felismena’s tale. "The ultimate source of the play was Diana by J. de Montemayor, which Shakespeare could have read in a French translation (1578), or possibly in B. Yonge's English version, not published until 1598" (Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays, p. 17). All 16th-century editions of Diana are rare. The Pirie copy of the 1598 Young translation brought $14,000 hammer at his sale (Sotheby’s, New York 2015, lot 597). The last copy of this 1561 Antwerp fifth edition to appear at auction was in J. Peeters-Fontainas’s renowned collection of Spanish books printed in the Spanish Netherlands, sold at his 1978 sale (Sotheby's, London, lot 368, £750 hammer). Peeters-Fontainas located only his own copy and that in the British Library. A recent OCLC search confirms one copy at the British Library.REFERENCE: Peeters-Fontainas 804; Palau 177943