Plays of William Shakespeare : The Memorial Theatre Edition, Edited
by C. C. Flower. 8 vols. (Midland Educational Company. Birmingham and elsewhere.) — This edition is intended for theatrical purposes, and for Shakespeare reading-clubs. The plays are printed with a distinction between the text as written by the author and the text as it has been modified by the experience of many generations for dramatic performance. " The sentences usually omitted are put into smaller type." For the purposes of reading certain modifications have been made. "The editor has endeavoured, without altering the meaning of the poet, to omit or soften certain words and expressions."—We have also to acknowledge a reprint of the Comedies of William Congreve, 2 vols. (Methuen and Co.) Mr. G. S. Street furnishes an introduction, in which among other things, he defends his author against Mr. Henley's condemnation of his deliberate and unmitigable baseness of morality." His defence we do not profess to understand. "I think," he writes, "it may be shown that his attitude is a pose merely, and an artistic and quite innocent pose. It is the amusing pose of the boyish cynic turned into an artistic convention." This sounds very like nonsense, unless, indeed, " artistic convention " is an obscure way of putting Charles Lamb's half-humorous apology that the world of Congreve and his fellows was not meant to be a real world, but a con- ventional world in which all moralities were non-existent. But people like Mr. Street want chastisement from the vigorous common-sense of a Collier.
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