SHAKESPEARE BEWIGGED.* Ara. frequenters of the Phoenix revivals are aware

of Mr. Mon- tague Summers' copious knowledge of the Restoration, stage. None of us, then, who belongs to that society will be surprised that the adaptations of Shakespeare which he has put before the public are by Sir William Davenant, Dryden, and Nahum Tate rather than those which were made In the eighteenth century and which might have proved as interesting. But even those who know his enthusiasm for his ,period will probably be astonished that Mr. Summers should have thought it worth while to linger over Duffett's farce, The Mock Tempest, or The Enchanted Castle, as sickening a piece of squalid indecency as the age affords and one whose sordidness is relieved by barely two or three passages of thin wit. However, we must not forget that Mr. Summers edited Mrs.. Aphra Ban's works in six volumes and hence may be assumed to have a strong stomach. But if the farce displays the age's particular brand of coarseness the " streaming ordures " as Dryden called it—the sort of nastiness which Swift had in mind when he described the social life of the Yahoos, Dryden and Davenant's Tempest does give an interesting epitome of the period's respectable qualities and defects.

In The Tempest Shakespeare is at his most illusive and unearthly, and so what remains from his pen in Dryden and Davenant's The Enchanted Island acts as the most perfect reagent to the new work. The whole shows us the essentials of an age, which, reacting from an epoch of mysticism, was, above all, logical, worldly and correct. I should imagine that a play written in collaboration by Mr. Somerset Maughanx and Mn Walter do In Mare with sonic help from Mr. George Robey might give us something of the elaborate neatness of structure combined with the fantastic, spiritual incoherence of this curious production. In some ways The Enchanted Island is to my mind a very good play. The comic scenes between the sailers and Caliban are really Immanent, notwithstanding some rather " period " jokes• for which the happy idea of giving Caliban a twin sister makes an opportnnikv. The thoroughness and gusto with which this theme is treated can be imagined. Bat thoroughness is really the keynote of the.revisions. The original gives us in Miranda a young woman who has never seen a man. Dryden's love of symmetry caps this with a new character, Hippolit.o, a young man who has- sever seen a woman. Then there must be an " opposite number " for him. So Miranda is provided with a minx of a sister, Dorinda.

Poor Prospero ! The amount of staff work that he has to do after the shipwreck to keep all the characters, who have got to be surprised when they meet, from prematurely tumbling over cash--other, would break the heart of any ordinary enchanter. On the whole, it seems rather to suit Prospero, who has grown • Shakespeare Adaptations. With an. Introduction and Notes by Montagu,

Stunincrs. londOn : Jonathan Cape. r158.

a little less portentous and oracular and has had his speeches cut up and has been generally " brightened." Some of his new " numbers " have real merit. The following, for instance, where Dryden, whom the subject obviously fascinated, makes him—like Adam and Raphael in The State of Innocence—debate the dilemma of free will and prevision. One of Prospero's prophecies has failed of fulfilment " On what strange grounds we build our hopes and fears ! Man's Life is all a Mist, and in the dark. Our Fortunes moot us.

If Fate be not, then what can we foresee ?

Or how can we avoid it, if it be ?

If by Free-will in our own paths we move, How are we bounded by Decrees above ? Whether we drive, or whether wo are driven, If ill 'tis ours, if good the act of Heaven."

Another fine piece of new work is a passage which occurs in a conversation between the innocent Hippolito and Prospero. Here only do we feel that Dryden in the least approaches the mood of The Tempest. Hippolito has just seen his Dorinda :-

"Hip. : I'd quit the rest o' th' World that I might live

Alone with her, she never should be from me.

We two would sit and look till our Eyes ak'd. Prosp. : You'd soon be weary of her.

Hip. : 0, Sir never.

Prosp. : But you'l grow old and wrinckf d, as you see Me now, and then you will not care for her. Hip. : You may do what you please, but, Sir, wo two Can never possibly grow old. Proap. : You must, Hippolito. Hip. : Whether we will or no, Sir, who shall make us ? Prose.: Nature, which made me so.

Hip. : But you have told me, [Sir,] her works are various ; She made you old, but she has made us young."

The passage is solitary. For the rest of the play the loves of Dorinda and Hippolito are merely made the more knowing by their strictly temporary innocence. But perhaps the two men and the two ages can be best displayed in the microcosm of the change of a single word. Shakespeare's Prospero exclaims, My foot my tutor ! " Dryden's, " My child my tutor !" Let the next lecturer upon the literary history of the two epochs take that as a text for his discourse.

Unfortunately space does not allow me to touch upon Nahum Tate's King Lear, which, as the reader is probably &ready aware, is a play which has been tidied in much the same spirit, a love affair having been invented for Edgar and Cordelia, and the " comic " character of the fool having been kept carefully apart from the " tragic " character of the King. We may laugh at these adaptations and yet who can deny that the Elizabethans would have been the greater had they had a little more of the later sense of construction ? Mr. Summers

contributes a long and interesting introduction to the three pieces. It is itself, strangely enough, a monument not only of

learning but of bad construction. Many of his most entertaining facts are almost lost in the welter of footnotes and parentheses.

TARN.