Books: Play Worlds

Play Worlds SHAKESPEARE—Mark Van Doren—Holt ($3).

In the 20th Century a whole tribe of scholars and interpreters have encamped on the slopes of the Bard, assaying his every semicolon. Their discoveries have made a gulf great & wide between the specialist's knowledge of Shakespeare and the ordinary reader's memory, in which the plays are likely to seem bombastical old standbys, crested here and there with great quotations. To distill the specialist's knowledge, to provide a lucid and sound account of what art may now be seen in every play, remained an...

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