ICONOCLASTES, OR THE FUTURE OF SHAKE- SPEARE. By Hubert Griffith.
(Kegan Paul. 2s. 6d.).- - Mr. Hubert Griffith's experience as a dramatic critic has firmly convinced him that nothing is wrong with Shakespeare, and that nothing is wrong, either, with the public taste. It is the producer who is to blame for the lamentable fact that Shakespeare is unpopular. How are we to give the Bard a future, since his past weighs so stiflingly upon him ? We must forget that he is the Bard. The producer must even forget that Shakespeare exists, or has existed. The plays must be given as though (suppose) they were by Mr. Frederick Lonsdale. More exactly, they must be given as Sir Barry Jackson and Mr. H. R. Ayliff gave Hamlet in the autumn of 1925 ; in modern costume, without false beards, cackling stage laughter, strained voices and gesture. That plus-four Hamlet seems mightily to have impressed Mr. Griffith. What was said of it in the Spectator may be recalled—its daring modernization was, after all, form of first-aid for actors ; not so much for Shakespeare or his audiences. Our actors have lost the romantic tradition. But has not the age also lost it, except in the form of crook drama and fiction ? Have we not forgotten our fairy tales / If so, Mr. Griffith is right. The romantic Shakespeare must go ; the realism, which Mr. Griffith will have to be what is universal in human nature, may remain. Yet'one
cannot see the fine pageant of the historical plays unrolling itself in twee*. and ...smart . And, for the other iliac, the case for a deliberate-poetical convention, the reader may be referred, opportunely, to Professor Gilbert Murray's just-published lectures on Classical Tradition, recently reviewed here. But, for the mood of the moment, Mr. Griffith's is an acceptable downright-dogmatic plea for Shakespeare without pedantry-Shakespeare redivivus, as though he were one of us,. and not a mere dead Elizabethan,
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