PHILLIPS, Edward.

Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets, especially the most eminent, of all Ages ... with some Observations and Reflections upon many of them, particularly those of our own Nation. Together with a prefatory Discourse of the Poets and Poetry in generall ...

London, Printed for Charles Smith ... 1675. 12mo., pp. [36], 192, 261, [3], complete with the two medial blanks following the prelims and the two pages of advertisements at the end; nineteenth-century red straight-grain morocco, rubbed, g.e., bookseller's label on front pastedown of W. H. Kühl, Berlin. First and only early edition. The author was the nephew and pupil of John Milton, and Milton's hand has often been suspected here, especially in the remarkable 'Discourse of the Poets and Poetry in Generall', and in the warm praise of Shakespeare ('the Glory of the English Stage ... never any represented nature more purely to the life ... he pleaseth with a certain wild and native Elegance ... ') and of Marlowe ('a kind of second Shakespeare').The coverage of playwrights and minor versifiers is quite remarkable, and one supplementary list - 'Women among the Antients [the Moderns] eminent for Poetry' - includes newcomers like Anne Bradstreet of Massachusetts Bay. William Winstanley's Lives of the English Poets (1687) is largely plagiarized from Phillips, but some of the first-hand information in Theatrum Poetarum itself may derive from a perished work of Thomas Heywood. Pforzheimer 797; Wing P 2075.

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