Justin Croft Antiquarian Books - Rare and Antiquarian Books and Manuscripts

First edition, printed posthumously, of the only known drama by the playwright and literary biographer Thomas Whincop (d. 1731). “The tragedy, which dramatizes the struggle of George Castriot to defend Albania from Turkish conquest, takes as its source the 1721 English translation of Scanderbeg the Great by Anne de La Roche-Guilhem. In the light of the patriot whig opposition to Walpole, Whincop’s dramatic portrait of the Albanian hero whose ‘conqu’ring sword / Oppos’d the torrent of the tyrant’s power’ (Scanderbeg, 16) may well have been intended as a propaganda piece. However, Whincop’s play was never performed...” (Brayne in Oxford DNB). It also contains a “Compleat list of all the English dramatic poets, and of all the plays ever printed” [pp. 87-320] probably compiled by John Mottley, which includes Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Otway, Waller, Cibber, Addison, Steele, and Garrick. “The Compleat List of All the English Dramatic Poets of 1747, appended to Thomas Whincop’s play Scanderbeg, appears to be by Mottley and is therefore his last known work: in the spirit of a reckoning up, he claims his portions of various collaborations and paternity of theretofore unacknowledged works; the entry on himself he made his own memorial” (J. M. Rigg, rev. Yvonne Noble, Oxford DNB). The list is illustrated with attractive portraits.