AN ESSENTIAL SHAKESPEARE: NINE PLAYS AND THE SONNETS.

Edited byRussell Fraser '47. New York: The Macmilian Company. 534 pp. $5.25.

Chairman of the Department of English, University of Michigan, Professor Fraser in his introduction suggests: "We do not read Shakespeare — or Stendhal or Dante — because they are part of our heritage, which means, customarily, fossils embedded in a petrified culture." Alive today, they are vital writers able to transcend the 19th century or the 13 th or the Elizabethan Age. Because Shakespeare's observation is total and his reporting unreservedly honest, he is "a prime candidate for censorship or the asylum." We trust him because without flinching he recognizes in his plays the existence of evil, and accordingly after 350 years we venerate him as our teacher. He forces us to understand that in ourselves are powerful and endlessly antagonistic forces, the forces of grace versus those of the ebullient and ungovernable will. In this era of mass murder and acts of violence against human beings on a scale hardly thinkable in previous generations, Shakespeare will not allow us to derive a special comfort from the record of history. As ethical modern thinkers we will be forced by the enlightened Elizabethan to eschew the fallacious and comforting assumptions that we are merely observers, not participants. Shakespeare demands that we confront horrors in personal terms.

Professor Fraser offers teachers and students valuable essays, modern in tone, after each play and useful glosses at the bottom of each page. He includes film and records sources in various bibliographies. The plays are Romeo and Juliet, AMidsummer-Night's Dream, King Henry IV:Part 1, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello,Measure for Measure, King Lear, and TheTempest.