THE SHAKESPEARE BALL SOUVENIR.*
PROBABLY no one would have been so surpriad as Mr. William Shakespeare if he could have visited the ball which was held in his honour on June 20th last. Although costume played so large a part in the scenic display of the original performances of his plays, it was by no means costume as understood in our day. On every page of the Shakespeare Ball Souvenir there is evidence of this fact. The Greek chitons of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Venetian costumes of The Merchant of Venice alike testify to the pains which were taken to make the costumes representative, not of the English Elizabethan era, but of the time when the events of each play were supposed to have taken place. The Shakespeare Ball Souvenir, with its large number of care- fully produced pictures, is a delightful reminiscence of the ball for the dancers, and also a curious comment on the difficulty which amateurs find in avoiding looking " dressed up." Oddly enough, a larger proportion of the men's pictures look as if the wearers were in their proper clothes than do those of the women. There are notable exceptions, though wild horses would not drag from the present writer the names of the persons who looked like real representatives of their parts or of those who merely had assumed fancy costume. There are portraits which look absolutely modern, and again there are others which might be representations of persons living in the times which are indicated by their dresses. The book is gorgeously pro- duced, and the pictures, though sonic of them are a little startling, are mostly very pleasing. The names of Mr. Ber- nard Shaw and Mr. Chesterton should have guaranteed the quality of the letterpress. Unfortunately this is not the case, and though Mr. Shaw endeavours to be wittily para. doxical, ho succeeds in merely being rather tediously flippant. Mr. Chesterton does better. He has an idea in his paper and, as usual, makes the most of it. But the interest of the book does not lie in the least in the letterpress, and it must be con- fessed the whole volume will be more interesting to those who want "just to see what old So-and-So looks like" than to any one who was not present on June 20th, Perhaps the most astonishing fact about what will be justly known as a memorable ball is the statement on the last page of the Souvenir that the profits amounted to the sum of £10,000. Let us hope that the book itself will add handsomely to this already handsome result.
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