‎ANONYMOUS - ‎
‎Le Bourru Comedie. - [NO KNOWN COPIES IN THE TRADE]‎

‎A la Haye, Aux Depens de la Troupe des Comediens, 1706. 12mo. In floral coloured wrappers with leather back-strip. Wear to extremities, title-page with underlignings in red. Internally nice and clean. 60 pp.‎

Reference : 62250

‎ The exceedingly rare first edition of “Le Bourru”, a comedy in 24 acts, a fine example of early eighteenth-century comic theater drawing heavily on the tradition of Molière. We have not been able to trace a single copy in the trade, nor does OCLC list any copies. The authorship has puzzled readers and bibliographers since its publication: Immediately after its publication it was, questionably, attributed to playwright Jean Palaprat. The attribution seems to originate from a confusing bibliographic note by Beauchamps in 1706, which have been misread or misinterpreted over time. This early note ambiguously linked Le Bourru to Le Grondeur, a known play co-authored by Brueys and Palaprat which created a trend among bibliographers to assume Palaprat's authorship. Subsequent scholars and catalogers (De Mouhy, de la Vallière and Professor Koch) accepted this assumption with varying levels of caution, gradually turning it into a fact. Spire Pitou concluded (in “Jean Palaprat and Le Bourru (1706)”“Modern Language Notes”, Vol. 75, No. 4, 1960) that the Palaprat-attribution is a result of bibliographic tradition rather than actual evidence and that the author is anonymous. The paper also suggests that the play was probably written for a military audience in Holland as it was published in The Hague and set in Namur and contains no offensing political content. ‎