19 APRIL 1890, Page 41

Famous Elizabethan Plays. By H. M. Fitzgibbon. (W. H. Allen

and Co.)—Mr. Fitzgibbon has given us in this volume six plays of the Elizabethan period,—Dekker's Shoemakers' Holiday, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Silent Woman, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Perkin Warbeck, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Each play is prefaced with a short life of its author, and a "reading table," giving the number of lines omitted or altered. It should be said that the editor "bowdlerises" with discretion, a process by which we cannot but think that the plays are improved. It seems to us sheer pedantry to banish a fine drama, as some of these must be banished, rather than expunge some thirty or forty lines.