John Rastell's Interlude of The Four Elements, As Performed at the University Printing House, Cambridge in the Summer of this Year, Now Printed for the Friends at Christmas

Hard cover, 8 vo., with red cloth spine with title in gilt, cream paper covered boards featuring a facsimile of the title page of the original text in black, 73 pp. The dramatic text is accompanied by several modern illustrations in red ink, as well as reproductions of original woodblock illustrations, and musical notations, in black. The title page is in black and red. The title performance was part of celebrations honoring the four hundred fiftieth anniversary of the first book printed at Cambridge. The Introduction by Brooke Crutchley includes a good biography of the Tudor polymath John Rastell, (1475-1536.) He trained as a barrister at Oxford and was a member of Middle Temple. He would devise pageants for King Henry VIII, married the sister of Sir Thomas More, and was ultimately denounced as a Protestant. He thus would lose his burgeoning printing business, begun around 1512, (specializing in a new method of printing music,) as well as his own works concerning the law. The original Tudor drama was written around 1519. Condition: Fine.…