Mr. Edgar I. Fripp, who has patiently edited the Corpora-
tion minutes and accounts of Stratford-upon-Avon in Shake- peare's day, seems to know all the burgesses and their houses intimately. This mastery of local detail lends interest and value to his new volume of Shakespeare Studies (II. Milford, 7s. rid.). From the literary standpoint the careful I mar on " Shakespeare's Use of (bid's Metamorphoses " is to le (sail- mended. There is a suggestive parallel between the death by drowning of Katharine Hamlet, spinster, in the Avon near Stratford, in December. 15711, and-the fate of Ophelia ; the dramatist may well have remembered the ease, for a namesake of his had been drowned in the river a few months earlier, and the jurors on each occasion returned a verdict of misadventure. Mr. Fripp's modest. and useful book is to be commended. It is well illustrated with photographs of old houses, MSS. and the like.
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