Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Issue 01 (1936-01).djvu/2

SHAKESPEARE
LIVES AGAIN . . . .

With Shakespeare's debut in Hollywood, an important Shakespeare revival has begun. Shakespeare used to be considered by the average person as something highbrow and therefore uninteresting; the dry-as-dust methods of teaching it in many of our schools have often succeeded in killing a love for Shakespeare at the outset of the student's acquaintance with him; and also the slovenly way it was treated on the stage, with one or two stars who made their words intelligible, and the other actors mouthing their words as if the Shakespeare idiom were another language altogether. Then, a few years ago, the Stratford-upon-Avon players came from England, and acted Shakespeare's plays as if they were written in their own everyday speech, so natural was their use of it. In 1933 and 1934 the Globe Theater players, from England, gave tabloid versions of Shakespeare's plays in the English Village at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, lasting a little less than an hour each, and made enthusiastic Shakespeare lovers out of thousands of people from all over the United States. Every performance was played to a packed theater, and there were six performances a day during the two summers of the Chicago fair. The Globe Theater players repeated their success at the world’s fair in San Diego. A year ago Max Reinhart put on A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM as a spectacle on the stage; and since then he has made a feature-length movie of it in Hollywood, produced with all the lavishness of which Hollywood is capable.

And so, Wright's Shakespeare Library presents the most attractive and authentic edition of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM ever published: a de luxe edition in book-magazine form, with large, graceful type; printed on a good grade of paper that does not glare; bound with ample margins; and profusely illustrated with the exquisite line drawings of Virgil Finlay.

★★★

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By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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