SHORTER NOTICE
The Story of StratfordLttpcin-Avon. By J. C. Trewin. (Staples. 8s. 6d.)
SOMETHING like a million people now visit the Birthplace during every decade. This slender book, affectionate and crammed with information, is likely to prove indispensable to those whose first love is, like the author's, for the breathing Stratford of theatre and town and not that of show-case and catalogue. There are too many relics,. too much temptation to charge from shrine to shrine, but Mr. Trewin, who knows the place as playgoer, resident and, of course, as critic, reminds us that you are more likely to track down the ineffable quarry in his own plays or in the Avon meadows or " in the early evening of a winter's .day," whin the town is quiet and free of the hurly-burly of festival. Halfway through the book. no ordinary guide anyway, the author makes his last concession to the shrine-hunter. The rest is devoted to the growth of the theatre (can any town have been so dilatory in paying the right kind of homage. to its greatest son ?); the Garrick Jubilee, grandiloquent squib ; the 1824 Club " for Gentlemen only "; the Tercentenary Festival ; the ill-fated first Memorial:Theatre with its "plum-cake turrets and sham Gothic extravagances "; Benson ; Bridges-Adam ; the Fire ... and so on. Tourists may find the illustrations adequate, yet the text deserves something more enterprising than these lack- lustre plates. The format is spacious, but unfriendly to any but the largest pocket.
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