The Works of Thomas Campion, Complete Songs, Masques, and Treatises with a Selection of the Latin Verse
Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1967. First Edition since Percival Vivian's edition of 1909. 8vo. Black cloth boards. Spine stamped in gold. Red endpapers. 521 pp. Book is in fine condition / .Dust jacket a little worn at top and bottom edge with one 1/4" tear at top joint. Otherwise crisp, clean and very good. Item #926
In addition to a new and improved text of Campion's English works -- songs, masques, and treatises -- it contains prose translations of selected Latin panegyrics, elegies and epigrams, accompanied by the Latin text. Musical settings for some of Campion's best-known songs supplement the text.
Thomas Campion, one of the foremost Elizabethan songsters, exhibits in his verse an impressive terseness and a beautiful sense of poise in complex emotional situations. (In this he can be compared with Ben Johnson, although he is not as dependent as Johnson on a formal stance.) His range is considerable, including, bawdy country songs, terse classicist statement, a warm eroticism akin to that of the Latin elegists, and religious meditations. This definitive edition of Campion's works is the result of the growing Campion vogue, and the general renewal of interest in Elizabethan literature. Campion's position in the Elizabethan period is unique in that both as poet and as musician he set all but a handful of his own poems to music. Hence his settings constitute extraordinarily important commentaries on his texts.
Price: $20.00