(p. 99), "we have to guess what he [Claudius] is saying and thinking, from a lesser amount of detail, a less adequate fund of information." Again, when he argues (p. 30) that Claudius calls for his Swiss guard because he knows he cannot trust his Danish one, and insists (p. 60) that the King's utterance of the lines,

"There's such a divinity doth hedge a king,

That treason can but peep to what it would,"

is a "silly performance did not Claudius possess a commanding port and embody something of kingly divinity," he is not only guessing but attaching too much importance to Elizabethan commonplaces. And when he advances the opinion that Hamlet must be a liar for calling the King a drunkard and sensual fellow and follows it up with the argument that in this longest of Shakspere's plays not a drunken man appears, while Claudius "does not kiss his wife," nor "fondle her," nor "pinch her cheek," nor "paddle in her neck,” he is not only employing a very untrustworthy form of argument but forgetting that neither the scene of action nor the mood of the characters lend themselves to drunkardness and "paddling in the neck."

In a word, Professor Jones's study is always interesting and stimulating, sometimes brilliant; but at least every inexperienced student who reads it should follow his reading by a careful examination of the "Revenge Tragedies" and such productions as Professor Lewis's The Genesis of Hamlet or Professor Stoll's Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study.

Kenyon, John S. A Note on Hamlet. Philological Quarterly, 1, 71-73.

Kuhl, Ernest P. Shakspere's Purpose in Dropping Sly. Modern Language Notes, XXXVI, 321-329.

Law, Ernest. Shakespeare's 'Tempest' as Originally Produced at Court. London, Chatto and Windus, 1920.

Lawrence, W. J. Shakespeare's Boards. New Statesman, May 21, 1921, p. 188.

Lefranc, Abel. Un Vocable Shakespearien: Honorificabilitudinitatibus. Revue du Seizième Siècle, 1921, pp. 137-138. Leftwich, Ralph Winnington. Shakespeare's Handwriting and Other Papers. Worthing. Gazette Co., 1921.

Levey, Sivori. The Source of 'The Tempest.' Privately printed by author, 12 St. John's-Road, Putney, S. W., 1921. Liebermann, F. Shakespeare als Bearbeiter des King John, I Teil. Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 142 (N. S., 42), 177-202.

Lodge, O. W. F. Shakespeare and Sir John Cheeke. London Times Literary Supplement, March 10, 1921, p. 160. Looney, J. T. Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. London, Palmer and Hayward, 1920.

M., D. L. The Problem of Pericles. Nation and the Athenaeum, XXIX, 298-300.

McCreary, W. H. The Fourth Citizen in Julius Cæsar. English Journal, x, 476-77.

Monaghan, James. Falstaff and his Forebears. Studies in Philology, XVIII, 353-361.

Forebears are Derrick and Sir John Oldcastle in Famous Victories of Henry V, Tarlton's admirable acting of Derrick probably providing Shakspere with suggestions.

Montgomery, Marshall. Cursed Hebona' as Guaiacum officinale

(or Lignum Vitae) in Shakespeare's Hamlet, I, v. 62. Proceedings of Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. XIV (1921). Murry, J. Middleton. The Hyper-editing of Shakespeare. The Nation and the Athenaeum, XXIX, 510-511.

Review of "The New Shakespeare" edited by Sir Arthur QuillerCouch and Mr. J. D. Wilson.

Murry, J. Middleton. Shakespeare and Florio. The Nation and the Athenaeum, XXIX, 741-742.

Odell, George C. D. Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. 2 vols. New York, Scribner, 1920.

Ord, Hubert. Chaucer and the Rival Poet in Shakespeare's Sonnets. London, Dent, 1921.

An attempt to show: (1) Shakspere's sonnets contain numerous echoes of Chaucer; (2) the "rival poet" is Speght, whose conceit in his edition of Chaucer had annoyed Shakspere.

Østerberg, V. Studier over Hamlet-Teksterne, I. Copenhagen. Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1920.

Parry, John. Review of Frederick J. Harries' Shakespeare and the Welsh (1919). Journal English and Germanic Philology, xx, 410-412.

Pollard, A. W. Review of N. T. Price's The Text of Henry V (1921). Modern Language Review, XVI, 339-40.

Pollard, Alfred W. Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of his Text. Second Edition,

Revised with an Introduction. Pp. xxviii+110. Cambridge University Press, 1920.

This revised edition of Mr. Pollard's Sandras Lectures-which were delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1915, printed in successive numbers of The Library in 1916, and published in book form in 1917-is especially welcome to students of Elizabethan literature, not only because the first edition has for some time been out of print but because it is the first of a series of five studies by Messrs. Pollard and J. Dover Wilson to be printed under the general title of " Shakespeare Problems." The main purpose of the present volume is, as the author puts it, to establish the fact that the quarto editions of Shakspere's plays are a good deal closer to the original manuscripts from his pen than most of the text-builders have allowed" -a thesis not very successfully indicated by the slightly startling title of the book.

After an introduction of some twenty pages, in which he reviews the more important contributions of recent years to Shaksperean textual criticism, Mr. Pollard presents the reader with a sort of introductory chapter entitled "The Regulation of the Book Trade in the Sixteenth Century." The discussion, which is necessarily very brief and general, points out that authors, in consequence of the precautions taken by the Crown to protect the printers who had received grants of privilege" and on account of the increasing power and dignity of the Stationers' Company, were more adequately protected against piracy than is usually supposed. He gives a brief history of the Stationers' Company, points out that the organization really exercised licencing authority from the time of the granting of its charter in 1557, and that its methods of conducting business not only protected authors but encouraged them as well.

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The second chapter, "Authors, Players, and Pirates in Shakespeare's Day," argues that, whereas the excessive number of printers in London and the system of patronage in vogue at the time encouraged piracy, still the practice of appropriating literary property by unscrupulous printers was largely confined to the works of dead authors and men whose pride and rank forbade their going to law over such matters as the rights of authorship. Mr. Pollard shows the improbability of various theories that have been advanced to explain the unauthorized publication of Shakspere's plays; and, while granting that some four or five of his dramas were surely pirated, contends that the majority of the quartos were honestly printed from copy purchased from the players themselves. In view of the facts that the Stationers' Company was careful about upholding its rights and none of the admittedly surreptitious quartos were entered on the Register of the company, he submits the interesting probability that an entry on the Stationers' Register is good prima facie evidence that the play so entered was honestly secured from the players.

In the chapter titled "The Manuscripts of Shakespeare's Plays Mr. Pollard attempts what he frankly admits to be the very difficult and dangerous task of giving the usual process taken by a play from the time it left the author's hand until its appearance in the First Folio. He emphasizes particularly the point that the First Quarto editions of some of Shakspere's plays may have been set up from the author's own autograph manuscript. The final chapter-“ The Improvers of Shakespeare "-is surely the most interesting, if not the most valuable, discussion in the volume; and it should be studied intensively by every student who contemplates editing an Elizabethan text. The mistakes in the methods of earlier editors of Shakspere are indicated and two very vital and fundamental principles of bibliography are set before the reader: (1) only the First Quarto and First Folio editions of Shakspere's plays are of significance in attempting to ascertain what Shakspere actually wrote: (2) the First Folio, at least for some of the plays, must be regarded as an edited text. Interesting, too, is the tribute paid to Edmund Malone, whom the further one goes in the study of Elizabethan drama the more readily one admits to be the greatest of all students of Shakspere.

It is to be regretted that in such a valuable and suggestive book Mr. Pollard, who has elsewhere shown such sanity and common-sense, should have apparently forgotten what he too modestly insists on calling the humble duties of the bibliographer, and, under the influence of Mr. Percy Simpson's theory of Shaksperian punctuation, becomes for the moment a critic of oratory and acting. It may fall within the province of a bibliographer to attempt to dangle before his readers "the hope that in some of those much vilified texts there may yet survive evidence of how Shakspere meant some of his great speeches to be delivered "; but until we know more about the vagaries of Elizabethan punctuation than Mr. Simpson has told us, may we be pardoned if we suspect that Mr. Pollard, in spite of his enormous knowledge of bibliography and his usual conservatism and commonsense, has, like so many of his predecessors, been tempted into overingeniousness by his veneration for the Master. At any rate, to the ordinary plodder of the twentieth century it takes considerable effort and some imagination to convert the supra-grammatical stops of Elizabethan quartos into sobs and caresses, even if Shakspere had no trouble in making the ordinary Elizabethan actor comprehend the subtleties of his punctuation.

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Price, Hereward T. The Text of Henry V. Newcastle-underLynne, Mandley and Unett, 1921.

Purves, John. Shakespeare-the English Aeschylus. Modern Language Review, XVII, 73-74.

Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur and Wilson, J. Dover (eds.). The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. "The New Shakespeare." Cambridge University Press, 1921.

Raven, Anton A. A Note on King Lear. Modern Language Notes, XXXVI, 187.

Rea, John D. A Note on Romeo and Juliet, II, i, 1-2. Modern Philology, XVIII, 675-76.

Robertson, J. M. The Masque in 'The Tempest.' London Times Literary Supplement, March 31, 1921, pp. 211-212.

Robertson, J. M. The Problem of "Hamlet." Pp. 90. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.

An American edition of Mr. Robertson's suggestive source study," printed in England in 1919, ought to be welcome to students in this country. With other eminent Shakspereans of our own generation, Mr. Robertson represents a reaction against the "romantic" interpretation of Shakspere and seeks to approach Hamlet from an historical point of view. He advances the attractive theory-essentially the theory advanced by such scholars as Boas, Lewis, and Stoll-that the "problem" of Hamlet is due to modern philosophizing and Shakspere's failure to reconcile the impossible situation which he inherited from older material. After reviewing briefly the various theories about Hamlet's hesitation-a résumé in which Lewis's The Genesis of Hamlet is strangely enough not mentioned-he discusses the relationship between Shakspere's and Kyd's versions of the Hamlet-story and the relation between Kyd's play and Belleforest, advancing the rather dangerous suggestion that Kyd's Hamlet was in two parts. In undertaking to adapt this old play "for his company, in the way of business," Shakspere was confronted by a practically impossible task. He was compelled to retain the old machinery of the piece-ghost, hesitation, feigned madness, etc. and at the same time to refine the character of the Prince. "But the revenge of the refined Hamlet must be delayed as was that of the barbaric Hamblet, without the original reason," that is, the inability to get at the King. To motive this hesitation Shakspere injects into the Prince " implicit pessimism," but it is insufficient. "The fact remains that he has not merely been explicit as he could not be he has left standing matter which conflicts with the solution of pessimism... and the ultimate fact is that Shakspere could not make a psychologically or otherwise consistent play out of a plot which retained a strictly barbaric action while the hero was transformed into a supersubtle Elizabethan."

Rhodes, R. Compton. The Arrangement of the First Folio. London Times Literary Supplement, December 29, 1921, p. 875. Cf. discussion by W. J. Lawrence, ibid., January 12, 1922, p. 28. Rolland, Romain. Die Wahrheit in dem Werke Shakespeares. Berlin, Paul Cassirer, 1920.