Current Literature
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE -
By Thomas Marc Parrott,
Thc Professor of English at Princeton University has pro- duced an extremely useful little handbook (Oxford University Press, Os.), full of the kind of information which the non- specialist reader of Shakespeare from time to time finds that he requires. There are chapters on Shakespeare's life, on his company, on his contemporaries, on the audience for which he wrote, on the text of his plays, on his poetry, and on his editors. Professor Parrott is more successful at exposition than at criticism, and the long chapter on Shakespeare's development, in which he traces chronologically his progress as a dramatist, is full of misleading assumptions and false conclusions. But where he is in effeet merely rearranging the views of other authorities, he is, if occasionally reliant on dan- gerous sources, generally sound and useful, and there is certainly no other book which presents so much relevant information in so little space. His book is excellently suited to be used as a companion to Shakespearian studies in schools. .
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