Messrs. Harrap - are issuing a new edition of Shakespear e
plays, The Readers' Shakespeare, edited by Dr. G. B. Harrison and Mr. F. H. Pritchard, of which The Merchant of Venice, Henry V., and Twelfth Night have appeared. In this series the stage directions and scene headings, which were inserted mostly by eighteenth-century editors. have been changed or
omitted, and remarks and notes rather in Mr. Bernard Shaw'g manner have been added instead. This has been done only to make the plays more enjoyable for the ordinary reader, and not, as the editors carefully point out, for specialists in
Elizabethan `literature. The notes make interesting reading in a frivolous way, but they do not really make it easier to read
the text intelligently (and this is their purpose), for they tell us no more than we can easily understand in any case if we read the text aloud. The opening notes to the Merchant of Ven;te, for instance, run -
" Antonio, the Merchant of Venice, suffers from fits of melancholy. He is a. good friend, generous and open-hearted, no ladies' man, a hater of Jewish usurers, a merciful lender, and well loved for his genuine' qualities. But for all that he is at times prone to regard his world with a dull hopelessness, and his company then becomes tedious. This, indeed, is what his friends, Salarino and Salanio are feeling, but, licking reasonable excuse to go away, they are obliged to force a conversation until they can politely take their
leave." * * * *
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