ENGLISH LITERATURE.
The Arden Shakespeare.
The Greater Plays in their literary aspect. One play in each volume, with Introduction, Notes, Essay on Metre, and Glossary. Based on the Globe text. From 144 to 224 pages. Cloth. Price, 25 cents a volume.
This edition presents the greater plays in their literary aspect, and not merely as material for the study of philology or grammar. Verbal and textual criticism has been included only so far as may serve to help the student in his appreciation of the poetry.
Questions of date and literary history have been fully dealt with in the Introductions, but the larger space has been devoted to the interpretative rather than to the matter-of-fact order of scholarship. Æsthetic judgments are never final, but the editors have attempted to suggest points of view from which the analysis of dramatic motive and dramatic character may be profitably undertaken.
In the Notes likewise, though it is hoped that unfamiliar expressions and allusions have been adequately explained, it has been thought more important to consider the dramatic value of each scene, and the part that it plays in relation to the whole.
Each volume has a Glossary, an Essay upon Metre, and an Index. Appendices are added upon points of interest that could not be treated in the Introduction or the Notes. The text is based on that of the Globe edition. The following plays are ready:—
Hamlet.—Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A.
Macbeth.—Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A., Oxford.
Julius Cæsar.—Edited by Arthur D. Innes, M.A., Oxford.
The Merchant of Venice.—Edited by H. L. Withers, B.A., Oxford.
Twelfth Night.—Edited by Arthur D. Innes, M.A., Oxford.
As You Like It.—Edited by J. C. Smith, M.A., Edinburgh.
A Midsummer Night's Dream.—Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A.
Cymbeline.—Edited by A. J. Wyatt, M.A., Cambridge.
The Tempest.—Edited by F. S. Boas, M.A., Oxford.
King John.—Edited by G. C. Moore Smith, M.A., Cambridge.
Richard II.—Edited by C. H. Herford, L.H.D., Cambridge.
Richard III.—Edited by George Macdonald, M.A., Oxford.
Henry V.—Edited by G. C. Moore Smith, M.A., Cambridge.
Henry VIII.—Edited by D. Nichol Smith, M.A., Edinburgh.
Coriolanus.—Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A., Oxford.
Much Ado About Nothing.—Edited by J. C. Smith, M.A., Oxford.
King Lear.—Edited by D. Nichol Smith, M.A., Edinburgh.
Introduction to Shakespeare.
By Hiram Corson, LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in Cornell University. Cloth. 400 pages. Introduction price, $1.00.
This work indicates some lines of Shakespearean thought which serve to introduce to the study of the plays as plays. The introductory chapter is followed by chapters on: The Shakespeare-Bacon controversy,—The Authenticity of the First Folio,—The Chronology of the Plays,—Shakespeare's Verse,—The Latin and Anglo-Saxon Elements of Shakespeare's English. The larger portion of the book is devoted to commentaries and critical chapters upon Romeo and Juliet, King John, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra. These aim to present the points of view demanded for a proper appreciation of Shakespeare's general attitude toward things, and his resultant dramatic art, rather than the textual study of the plays.
Introduction to Browning.
By Hiram Corson, LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in Cornell University. Cloth. 348 pages. Introduction price, $1.00.
This volume affords aid and guidance to the study of Robert Browning's poetry, which, being the most complexly subjective of all English poetry, is, for that reason alone, the most difficult. The exposition presented in the Introduction, of the constitution and skillful management of the dramatic monologue and the Arguments given to the several poems included in this volume, will, it is hoped, reduce, if not altogether remove, the difficulties of this kind. In the same section of the Introduction certain peculiarities of the poet's diction are presented and illustrated.
The following is the Table of Contents:—
I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning. II. The Idea of Personality and of Art, as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning's Poetry. (Read before the Browning Society of London in 1882.) III. Browning's Obscurity. IV. Browning's Verse. V. Arguments of the Poems. VI. Poems. (Under this head are thirty-three representative poems, the Arguments of which are given in the preceding section.)