Tragedies, a pleasant introduction to each volume by Mr. Charles Whibley, and a number of illustrations, largely from German engravings, which might well have been spared." Mr. Jaggard has compiled a record of the now destroyed Memorial Theatre at Stratford, since its foundation by Mr. Charles Flower in 1879.25 The late Professor Kilian, in Shakespeare und die Mode des Tags (Jahrbuch), describes the application of modern methods of staging to Shakespeare's plays. Dr. F. Schnapp (Jahrbuch), in Franz Liszt's Stellung zu Shakespeare, collects some letters and memoranda of the musician on the poet.

The present writer has reproduced in The First Illustration to Shakespeare' (Library, v. 326) a pen-and-ink drawing by Henry Peacham of a scene from Titus Andronicus, preserved in a manuscript at Longleat. To it is attached a script of some lines from the play, the text of which exhibits variants from that of the prints.

Many minor points and interpretations of individual passages are dealt with in communications to various periodicals, notably to the T. L. S., Modern Language Notes, and the Revue Anglo-Américaine. These are of unequal value. The more interesting are those by Mr. A. R. Cripps on the bearherd' (which he thinks an allusion to Alleyn) of 2 Henry IV, 1. ii. 192 (T. L. S., 9th Apr.); Mr. F. Madan on 'milice' for 'malice' in J. C. I. i. 174 (T. L. S., 23rd Apr., 14th May); Mr. R. C. Rhodes on a possible repainting of Shakespeare's monument in 1769 (T. L. S., 7th May); Mr. O. W. F. Lodge and M. Paul Reyher on a (not very probable) allusion to the death of Marlowe in the 'great reckoning in a little room' of A. Y. L. III. iii. 15 (T. L. S., 14th May, 27th Aug.); Miss L. G. Thompson on the name Gobbo in the registers of Titchfield (T. L. S., 17th Sept.); Miss M. L. C. Linthicum on the 'meacock' of T. S., II. i. 315 (M. L. N. xl. 96); Mr. M. L. Wilder and Professor G. L. Kittredge on Shakespeare's 'small Latin' (M. L. N. xl. 380, 440); Mr. W. A.

24 The Works of William Shakespeare, Chronologically Arranged, with Introductions by Charles Whibley. Macmillan. 3 vols. pp. xlii+618; xliv +718; lv +666. 7s. 6d. net.

25 Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon, by W. Jaggard. Shakespeare Press, Stratford-on-Avon. pp. 37. 18. 6d.

Osborne on the 'scamels' of Tp. 11. ii. 176 (M. L. R. xx. 73); Mr. B. Dickins on the 'Pythagoras concerning wildfowl' of T. N. IV. ii. 54 (M. L. R. xx. 186); Mr. A. R. Bayley on the identification (not a new one) of Mons, the Hill' in L. L. L. v. i. 89 with Harrow (N. Q. cxlviii. 399, 417); Mr. J. D. Rea on the microcosm (P. Q. iv. 345); Mr. M. P. Tilley on Hamlet's sweat and the phrase 'What is't o'clock' (J. E. G. P. xxiv. 315); Mr. K. Malone on the etymology of Hamlet (P. Q. iv. 158); Dr. A. Eichler on Shakespeare's use of the term Master' (E. S. lx. 134); Mr. E. P. Kuhl on Lead apes in hell' (S. in Ph. xxii. 453).

་

[By C. H. HERFORD]

Sir E. K. Chambers has reissued, in his 'Survey', the introductory essays contributed by him to the several plays of an edition of Shakespeare published some twenty years ago.26 In a review of the Year's Work of 1925' it would be improper to notice the book in detail, but equally improper to pass it by. Much, of course, has happened in the Shakespearian world since 1907-8, the date of the edition (the Red Letter' edition) in question. This is not the place to discuss the ethics (on which we cherish doubts) of Sir Edmund's plea that the maturer judgement of a man of sixty does not entitle him to erase or alter what the man of forty thought fit to record'. But his book has probably gained in homogeneity by that compliance. It represents, on the whole, that temper of Shakespearian criticism which was initiated in England by Coleridge, and of which Dr. A. C. Bradley is the greatest living master. His own intensive study of the Elizabethan stage notwithstanding, he is not of the school which allows either to the structure, the usages, the resources, or to the phases and fashions of that stage, a determining influence upon the character or the history of the Shakespearian drama. He dismisses, for instance, the theory, recent when he wrote, and now generally accepted, which connects the marked transition from the Antony and Timon group

26

Shakespeare: a Survey, by E. K. Chambers. Sidgwick & Jackson. pp. viii+325. 7s. 6d.

of tragedies to Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale with the new romantic comedy of Fletcher. Dowden, as is well known, saw in this transition a spiritual revolution, the nature of which he confidently diagnosed. That something happened in Shakespeare's mind which is by no means exhaustively expressed by a desire to keep the Globe and its company abreast of the new fashion must surely be affirmed to-day by many who would hesitate to endorse Sir Edmund's precise formulation of it in such statements as that Cymbeline is 'a palinode to King Lear' (p. 290) or (as he elsewhere puts it) to Othello (p. 219). And even within the scope of the 'tragic period' itself, while no one will deny a subtle change' of temper and of scope when we pass from Julius Caesar and Hamlet to Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, few would now consent to define it by saying that 'the issue has shifted from the relations of man and man to the relations of man and his creator'. We do not think that it is the language only which is here un-Shakespearian. Elsewhere Sir Edmund sometimes (like Bishop Blougram) 'says right things, but calls them', we must think, 'by wrong names'. One may surely do justice to the robust English quality of Falconbridge, that Coeur-de-lion redivivus, without affirming that he is clearly intended to be typical of the stout AngloSaxon race'. But our criticisms, as will be seen, rarely amount to more than a desire for more carefully limited statements of propositions which in substance we hold to be true. The cultivated student of Shakespeare will find throughout the volume comment and discussion of the entire series of the plays, controlled by a sensitive critical instinct, and habitually felicitous in expression. Two graceful Tercentenary sonnets provide prologue and epilogue.

VII

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

[By F. S. BOAS.]

THE year under review has made memorable contributions to the study of Elizabethan drama and stage-history. The two first volumes of an edition on the grand scale of Ben Jonson's works have been published. Documentary evidence concerning the death of Marlowe has been discovered. A collection of autographs of Tudor and Stuart dramatists has been made available. The authenticity of the disputed Revels Books has been established by new evidence. These and related items have their place in the following survey, which may conveniently begin with the one last mentioned and other contributions to our knowledge of theatrical history.

To the late D. T. B. Wood, Superintendent of the Students' Room in the Manuscripts Department of the British Museum, many investigators, and not least the present writer, were indebted for skilled help and counsel. Not long before his regretted death Mr. Wood performed an important service to scholarship by establishing beyond all reasonable doubt the genuineness of the Revels Books for 1604-5, and inferentially of those for 1611-12 and 1636. It is unnecessary here to go into the details of the long-drawn controversy. Our concern is with the points on which Mr. Wood fastened in his two articles, The Revels Books: the Writer of the Malone Scrap' and The Suspected Revels Books (R. E. S., Jan. and April). Doubters of the authenticity of the Books have had to dismiss as forged a list of plays performed in 1604-5 contained in a 'scrap' included in the Malone papers at the Bodleian, which, if genuine, must have been copied long before Cunningham's day. Mr. Wood was himself predisposed to the forgery theory, when he started on a new investigation of the problem. But he was struck by the similarity of the handwriting in the scrap' and in the letters of Sir William

Musgrave, who was a Commissioner at the Audit Office, to which the Revels Books belonged from 1785 till his death in 1800. Musgrave (as has been known) brought to Malone's notice the Revels Books as a whole, and in 1791 Malone inspected them, but makes no mention of that for 1604-5. What is more probable', Wood asks, 'than that Musgrave found and copied that book and sent the extract to Malone some time between the date of Malone's visit to the Audit Office and Musgrave's death in 1800?'

Furthermore, the watermarks are all in favour of the 1604-5 and 1611-12 Books being written on genuine paper of the period. Interpolation is impossible except on a blank leaf. The accounts as a whole must be genuine, and any criticism must be directed to the lists of plays alone. But if these lists were forged we then know that this must have taken place before Musgrave wrote the 'Malone scrap'. The forger would have had to find the necessary blank sheets in the documents himself, before Musgrave had noted them, to have written his lists, to have brought them to Musgrave's notice, and (if that was part of the plot) to have ensured their despatch to Malone'. Quod est absurdum.

Some other MS. lists of plays have recently been brought to light by Mr. Marcham in The King's Office of the Revels, 1610– 1622.1 Cotton MS. Tiberius E. X. is The History of Richard III, by Sir George Buck, Master of the Revels from 1610 to 1622. Some alterations have been made upon inserted scraps of paper and these also contain other fragmentary matter connected with the business of the Revels Office. It is this matter which has been facsimiled and transcribed by Mr. Marcham. It consists partly of letters and drafts, partly of four lists of plays, some thirty in all, of which several are not otherwise known. In a review of the work in R. E. S. (Oct.) Sir Edmund Chambers adds notes on the plays, which show that there is independent evidence... consistent with the production or revival of quite a substantial proportion' of them about 1619 or

1 The King's Office of the Revels 1610-1622: Fragments of Documents in the Department of Manuscripts, British Museum, transcribed by Frank Marcham, with a Preface by J. P. Gilson. Marcham. pp. 50, including 19 collotype plates. £2 28.