Terentius cum quinque commentis de TERENCE (c. 195-159 BCE) - 1508: ONLY TWO RECORDED COPIES

Terentius cum quinque commentis. Venice: Lazzaro Soardi, 1508.

Folio. 304 x 210 mm. Full-page woodcut on the verso of the title-page of Terence seated on a chair surrounded by his commentators in a large room with arches and an apse. Another magnificent full-page woodcut on sig. B3v of a theatre with the audience seen from the perspective of the actor on stage. With 153 woodcut vignettes in text illustrating the different characters of the comedies on stage. [10], XIII-CCXXXV [i.e. 232], [1] leaves. Collation: AA6 B4 C-Z8 AA-HH8 [lacking sig. F5 (p. 41)]. Worming on the final pages. Modern binding.

Shakespeare learned the five-act structure from Terence and modeled Love's Labor's Lost on Terence's Andria. See T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's Early Plays on the Background of Renaissance Theories of Five-Act Structure from 1470, (University of Illinois Press, 1947).

Illustrated edition of Terence's comedies with the commentaries by Aelius Donatus (fl. 4th cent.), Guy Jouennaux (c. 1450-1507), Giovanni Calfurnio (d. 1503), Josse Bade (1462-1535), and Servius (fl. 4th-5th cent.).

"Two admirable outline-woodcuts, each occupying a full page, are found at the beginning of the book. The first represents Terence in the act of lecturing, at a kind of professional desk, with Donatus, Accursius, and others of the chief Latinist grammarians, grouped around him . . . The second of the two large woodcuts is a view of the antique theater, or rather of the auditorium as seen from the stage. We need not be surprised to observe that the audience consists of persons, such as might have been met with in the streets of Venice in the fifteenth century; and that the actors, whom we see from behind, wear a sort of costume usually appropriated to fools and jesters" (Friedrich Lippmann, The Art of Wood Engraving in Italy in the Fifteenth Century [London: Bernard Quaritch, 1888], p. 93).

The Universal Short Title Catalogue lists only two known copies, not including the present one.

Reference: USTC 858671