19 MARCH 1921, Page 23

The Text of Henry V. By Hereward T. Price. (Newcastle-

under-Lyme : Mandley and Unett. 2s. 6d.)—Mr. Price's scholarly and well-reasoned essay seeks to show that the Quarto edition of Henry V. was not a first draft, but a surreptitious and mangled version of the much longer play which is given in the First Folio. We must not enter into this old and famous con- troversy ; all we need say is that Mr. Price puts his case well and fortifies it by many apt quotations. He contests the view of Mr. Pollard and Mr. Wilson that the Folio version is " the fine fruit of long years of stage experience," for " as it stands the Folio is unactable." This is a hard saying, however, for the methods of the Elizabethan stage differed widely from those of the twentieth-century stage. Mr. Price's essay is a fresh proof of the renewed vitality of Shakespearean studies, which have never attracted more attention than they receive to-day.