1 MAY 1953, Page 28

Shorter Notices This reprint of the Everyman edition of Shakespeare's

works still follows the old text of Clark and Wright's Cambridge Shakespeare, presumably because the use of a more modern text would have incurred paying royalties to the scholars who perhaps deserve them for improving our enjoyment of what Shakespeare wrote. The edition is in three volumes, and attached to the first is a "brief biography," rather a summary of the known facts of Shakespeare's life, by Oliphant Smeaton. What is new about the edition is the size of each volume, larger than the old Everyman (all Everymans are now to be enlarged to this size) and just avoiding, for a book of so many as eight or nine hundred pages, the cramped feeling of the old. At a guinea for the set, this seems a reasonable, workaday edition of Shakes- peare to have on one's shelf, or preferably under a bedside lamp. There is a useful glossary with each volume, without which it is impossible to read Shakespeare intel- ligibly. But the chief attraction is that the printing is reasonably spaced, the pages are not too small, and the book as a whole is not clumsy to handle. It was a pity the pub- lishers did not, even for eight shillings a volume, produce a more up-to-date text, although the chronological list of plays given with each volume "has been revised in the light of modern research." The plays should perhaps have been printed in this