BY PHOEBE ADAMS
THE GREAT SHAKESPEARE JUBILEE by CHRISTIAN DEELMAN (Viking, $5.95) is a demurely hilarious account of the original festival in honor of the Bard of Avon, and demonstrates that, like most such enterprises from that day to this, the affair was inspired by a simple desire to raise money. Stratford on Avon needed a new town hall, for which the local burghers were not about to pay one shilling more than necessary. Some genius conceived the notion of begging help from David Garrick, then at the height of a fame based primarily on his playing of Shakespeare. Garrick was a notoriously soft touch but no idiot; he wanted some glory in exchange for his contribution. Result — a festival, the first of its kind, with a parade, a sort of pageant, fireworks, and a masked ball. The thing filled the papers for months with satires pro and con, and when it finally came off, attracted hordes of fashionable Londoners, drew James Boswell disguised as a Corsican bandit, got rained out, drove the Stratfordians half out of their bucolic wits, and left everybody concerned in the red. It was a truly superb disaster and deserves the pains Mr. Deelman has taken to reconstruct it.
Conscientiously edited by Kenneth Neill Cameron, THE ESDAILE NOTEBOOK (Knopf, $6.95) contains early and hitherto unpublished poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with a formidable mass of background material assembled by the editor. The poems reveal that Shelley’s political ideas reached what was essentially their final form before he was twenty, that he developed his verse technique very rapidly, and that his juvenile work was as bad as anybody’s.
A. L. BARKER’S THE JOY-RIDE AND AFTER (Scribner’s, $3.75) contains three related stories, all concerned with people who cannot understand their own circumstances clearly and are therefore unable to adjust themselves to the ordinary realities of life. This sounds like the good old loneliness and isolation theme, and indeed it is, but Miss Barker’s writing is so skillful and her characters so persuasively odd and individual that the curse of familiarity is removed. The background is English, and Miss Barker has taken great care to make it solid, not only in the material matter of streets and trees and buildings, but as a social structure, a pattern of the interlocking affairs, customs, and requirements of a whole group of people. The crystal-sharp environment sets off the muddleheaded ness of Miss Barker’s people superbly.
THE ECHOING CLIFFS (McKay, $3.50) is a first novel by HJALMAR THESEN, who is a South African. The book tells a very simple story indeed about young love and hard times among what appear to be the Hottentots in the days before European settlement of the Cape of Good Hope. Mr. Thesen’s savages are a most gentle, courtly, Rousseauish lot — too well behaved to arouse much interest, really — but his descriptions of the country where they live and their methods of fishing, hunting, and clothing and amusing themselves have a continuous Hiawathan charm.
The Yale Series of Younger Poets has published THE BREAKING OF THE DAY (Yale University Press, $1.25) by PETER DAVISON. While the majority of Mr. Davison’s poems are concerned with large, grim questions of individual identity and purpose in the world, he writes with full awareness of the irony involved in asking such questions; there is, after all, nobody there to answer. This subtly humorous stoicism combined with an exceptionally acute consciousness of the connotations and sounds of words produces poems ranging in subject from death to Peeping Toms. Almost everything Mr. Davison remarks on any topic is surprising, but once he has said it, flawlessly right.
SNOW CRYSTALS (Dover, $2.95) is a paperback reissue of W. A. BENTLEY’S book of photographs, with a short text by W. J. Humphreys. Mr. Humphreys offers a brisk summary of what is known about the nature and formation of snow. The photographs, culled from a lifetime of delicate, ingenious picture taking, are laid out like lace mats on a black surface, and come to two hundred odd pages of designs, simple, complex, infinitely varied, altogether bewitching. An endearing copyright note invites the public to make any use desired of these snowflake portraits.