Pcpys on the Restoration Stage. By Helen McAfee. (Oxford Univer-
sity Press. 128. Gd. net.)—Under the auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Vale University, Miss McAfee has compiled a most valuable and interesting book from Pepys's Diary. All his references to the stage arc here collected, classified, and annotated. in the first part are his notes on plays, systematically arranged ; then come the references to the players, playwrights, and audiences ; lastly there aro the precious comments on the theatres and the staging. Thus we have in one section all Pepys's notes on the Shakespeare plays that he saw, and are reminded that, though Ire was bored by A Midsummer Night's Dream, he was a warm admirer of Hamlet and Macbeth. In her introduction Miss McAfee shows that Pepys was usually accurate, and that, unlike the Court, he disapproved of the looser productions of the Restoration stage as well as of the rhymed couplet which Dryden tried to acclimatize in our heroic drama.
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