The Shakespeare Symphony. By Harold Bayley. (Chapman and Hall. 12s.
6d. net.)—This "Introduction to the Ethics of the Elizabethan Drama" is an elaborate argument in support of a thesis which has a somewhat paradoxical look. Mr. Bayley allows that the dramatists of the closing decades of the sixteenth century—Greene, Marlowe, and company—were an ill-conducted crew, but he maintains that their literary work was on quite a different plane,—that is, to use his own words, when we examine their plays we have to "contrast the grace of their chivalry with the coarseness of contemporary manners; the serenity of their Religion with the harshness of Concurrent Theology; the richness of their Philosophy with the barren Jangle of the Schools." We concede at once that in seeking to make out his case he gives us much that is curious and interesting. He has read the dramatists in question, and has collected a notably good anthology from them. (It is curious to see how many parallels they all supply to Bacon, who may plausibly be said on the strength of them to have written, not the plays of Shakespeare only, but of the whole company of Shakespeare's contemporaries.) But we must own to feeling some doubt of the conclusions which he gets out of the contrast between these utterances and the pictures of contemporary manners and morals. Nevertheless, he has given us a highly interesting 'book.
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