POLITIAN Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's only play: a Renaissance tragedy of seduction and revenge, left unfinished at the altar.

It opens the morning after a revel, with masks, a lute, a lady's slipper and broken bottles lie across the floor of a Roman palazzo, and a servant is too drunk to know who has gone home. Behind the candle-ends sits a scandal: Castiglione has seduced his father's ward, Lalage, and abandoned her to marry his cousin, and alone in her chamber Lalage is turning from prayer to vengeance. Into this household comes Politian, Earl of Leicester, a soldier grown weary of his own fame, who hears an unseen woman singing behind a lattice and is lost.

Poe wrote the play in 1835 around a real Kentucky murder, moved it to sixteenth-century Rome, and broke it off just as his hero runs to kill the bridegroom. The final scene holds the moonlit Coliseum soliloquy, which Poe also published as a poem in its own right.

Around the tragedy runs a comedy below stairs: a maid showing off Castiglione's gifts, and a servant talked into believing he is dead. This edition follows the standard Mabbott text, leaving Poe's gaps visible rather than inventing what he never wrote.

A pocket edition in the Libelli series, small enough for an evening bag, under Olivia Petrini's cover of a Renaissance beauty washed in crimson. There is a wedding tonight in this play that stops before the bride and bridegroom reach the altar.

Drama · Libelli series · A6 pocket edition · Set in Bodoni · Cover by Olivia Petrini · Printed and bound in England ·