The Fables of Æsop: Paraphrased in Verse by John Ogilby and Adorned with Sculpture by Francis Cleyn (Franz Klein)

Aesop’s fables of the beasts have been adapted to the respective ages through which they passed, from antiquity to the present. This is no less true of the fables graced and amplified by the inimitable John Ogilby. He imaginatively elaborated them in the verse styles of the Cavalier poets of the early seventeenth century and first published them in 1651—a time in English political history when society was divided between the retreating Royalists, among whom Ogilby counted himself, and the victorious Parliamentarians. Ogilby, with discretion, could not resist reading the more political of the fables according to the troubling circumstances of the times. Yet they remain the familiar fables known and loved, accompanied by full page copper-plate etchings by the master designer and draftsman Francis Cleyn. This collection signals an important moment in the history of the illustrated English book, making it a treat for readers with its nearly equal collaboration between poet and artist. It is also a full scholarly edition with a critical and historical introduction, glosses, and a double set of annotations.

DONALD BEECHER is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University, Ottawa, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His publications range from translations of early French, Italian, and Spanish plays to a study of Renaissance literature in relation to the cognitive sciences. He has also published several editions of early English prose fiction, and has written on early pharmacology, fifteenth-century Italian theatre, fairy tales and folklore, the inquisition, lovesickness, sex changes, trickster cycles, early museology, nostalgia, and suspense. In his leisure time he plays the viola da gamba and has edited some sixty editions of early music. He is currently writing on John Milton’s Paradise Lost.