The Coming of Christ. MASEFIELD (John).

First Edition. 8vo. [228 x 147 x 10 mm]. [3]ff, 48pp. Bound in the original blue boards with vellum spine lettered in gilt, in the original dust-wrapper (dust-wrapper a little frayed around the edges).
London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1928.

Limited to 275 copies of which 250 were for sale. This is no.4, signed by John Masefield, and with his booklabel "From the library of John Masefield O.M., Poet Laureate". Masefield (1878-1967) was Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death, and was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1935.

When in the mid-1920s Masefield turned to writing plays based on religious themes, he encountered a ban on the performance of plays on biblical subjects that went back to the Reformation and had been revived a generation earlier to prevent production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. A compromise was reached, and in 1928 The Coming of Christ was the first play to be performed in an English Cathedral since the Middle Ages.

Stock no. ebc4326