A series of French Classical Matinées is being given by Mlle. Gina Palerme at the Duke of York's Theatre on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2.30. The plays will be produced as at La Comédie Française, with original music by Lully and other old masters. The list of plays is as follows: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molière), Le Malade Imaginaire (Molière), Les Précieuses Ridicules (Molière), Le Barbier de Seville (Beaumarchais), Les Romanesques (Rostand), Le Voyage de Mr. Perrichon (Laliche).
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
BEN JONSON'S EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR. Edited by Percy Simpson. Clarendon Press. 6s.
This is a pioneer volume to a complete edition of Ben Jonson's works, projected by Professor C. H. Herford and Mr. Percy Simpson, and its excellence is such that it is fervently to be hoped that we shall not have to wait long for the companion volumes. When these appear nothing more will be needed, and it will be possible for the ordinary person to read Jonson without floundering hopelessly among the maze of queries which the text at present available raises, and which its paucity of notes does nothing to explain. Mr. Simpson's admirable introduction deals with the quarto and folio texts, the date of the play's revision, and the general question of the portraiture of humours. It contains some excellent criticism of Jonson's revisions, and Mr. Simpson comes to the conclusion that Jonson began preparing the folio edition in 1612, and his reasons are, on the whole, convincing. There are sixty pages of notes.
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE. By Arnold Bennett. Chatto & Windus. 3s. 6d.
A writer of Mr. Arnold Bennett's eminence and great sagacity would be the last person to expect us to take this play seriously as a contribution to dramatic literature. Although it is a play of modern life in the most colloquial prose, it has less reality than the wildest and most phantasmagoric drama of the Elizabethans. We may not expect Mr. Arnold Bennett to create for us an imaginative world of his own in which there is an inner and satisfying truth, but we look to him to mirror in his own peculiarly brilliant fashion a part of contemporary life with that precision which has so often delighted us. There is nothing in this play that could not actually have happened, but it is impossible to believe in it as it is happening. Mr. Bennett has not visualised his people intensely enough; they are mere puppets borne along by the machinery of the play. This machinery is from the theatrical point of view effective, and it leaves the creation of the illusion of life to the flesh and blood of the actors, so that on the stage the play may have an effect which it can never have when read. The play, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with sacred or profane love; no hint of the tremendous reality of love in any sense appears between its covers.
W. J. TURNER.