SHAKESPEARIAN YEAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 740, 18 September 1953, Page 13

SHAKESPEARIAN YEAR

SHAKESPEARE SURVEY 6, edited ~ by Allardyce Nicolkk €ambridge University Press. English price, 18/-. -VEN at an increased’ price, the annual Shakespeare Survey remains excellent value. This year’s survey concentrates on the History: Plays, which have lately been receiving much closer attention from both. scholars and players. Harold Jenkins provides a’ useful account of changes in the critical approach to these plays over the last 50 years; there are studies on individual or related plays by Clifford Leech, Woif- | gang Clemen, and Karl Brunner; and Sir Barry Jackson has an: invaluable note for revivalists on his by ‘now celebrated production of Henry VI at Birmingham, The series of essays on famous libraries is continued by Godfrey Davies, who writes on The Huntington, and there are a number of stimulating miscellaneous pieces. If nothing in this volume has quite the weight of serious scholarship we had come to expect from earlier surveys, and if the. notes by Salvadcr de Madariaga and Chang Chen-hsien on translating Shakespeare into Spanish and Chinese. respectively seem hardly worthy of their place, the reviews of books and productions are particularly. well done.* In~ the /nternational Notes the New Zealand correspondent of Shakespeare Survey, tan A.- Gordon, contributes a brief account of recent Shakespeare productions in New Zealand. Professor Gordon pays a well-deserved tribute to the Community Arts Service and to Miss Ngaio Marsh -though not everyone who saw it: will agree with his characterisation of her Twelfth Night as "polished and sweetly

moving."

J.

B.