A NEW SHAKESPEARE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 244, 15 October 1925, Page 17

A NEW SHAKESPEARE.

TRUTH ABOUT THE SHREW.

THE FOOLING Or PETRTJCHIO. .SIR J. BARRIE AKD THE STATIONER'S GHOST. "I am very proud to be a freeman and liveryman of what has been so long called the 'mysteries and arts' of the Stationer?," said Sir Jamos Barrie, at a luncheon in the Stationers' Hall, after lie. Lord Balfour, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling had been made freemen and liverymen of the Stationers' Company with old-world ceremony. "1 feel, however.' , he continued, "that in bringing mc among you, and granting j mc this great honour, you have added another to the company's mysteries. "I like to think I am among the chosen, because I am a master of hard facts. The most valiant name, of; course, in your records is that of Shakespeare, and the first fact I want to put before you is this: I want to propose to you that you should enter in stationers' Hall one more edition of his work-. "The other sex, if so they may still be called, have long complained about Shakespeare's women; glorious creatures, but too subservient to the old enemy for this later day. They think that Shakespeare did not know what things were coming to women. "He knew: but in his writings he had to write with the knowledge that if he was advanced about women his plays would be publicly turned in the garden of Stationers' Hall. Fortunate Actress. "So he left a cipher —not in the text where everybody has been looking for it, but in the cunning omission of all stage directions, and the women of today, as he hoped, have had the wit to read that cipher aright, and so we are going to have a new edition of his works called, very properly the Ladies' Shakespeare. "When these plays are presented you will really be seeing Shakespeare on the gtage. and the fortunate actress (without altering one word, but by the use, of what we who write plays—or rather those who play our plays^ —call 'cunning' illuminating business) will be able to show you, for instance, the Shrew that Shakespeare drew, thus presented for the first time. "Katharine was really fooling Petnichio all the time when he carried her away from her marriage feast. Baptista, her father, was really a poor man, and there was no wedding feast. So Katharine got it to come about that she should be carried off by Petruchio in order to save that considerable expense. "The first evening at PetTUChio's house, when Petruchio was out in the wind and rain, distending himself because he thought he was taming her, do you really think that Katharine went supperless" to bed? No, she had a little hag with her, and in it a wing of chicken and some other delicacies, a half-bottle of the famous Paduan wine, and such a pretty corkscrew. "I won't tell you any more about the play, but go 'and book your seats, and you will find that it is no longer Katharine who is tamed." "Shakespeare has heard that he is about to be understood at last. That is another of my facts. They say that a look of expectancy has come over the face of his statue in Leicester Square. If the lady who gives us the real Katharine has the courage to climb over the railings when the rest of London is asleep, she may find Shakespeare waiting for her at the foot of his pedestal to lead her once round the square, talking to her in the language, not of Petruchio, but of Romeo. "Some say, alas, that Shakespeare was like the cuckoo that gets other birds to lay its eggs for it. A Last Look. ''My last fact. There must be few here who have not heard of the ghost of Stationers' Hall. All those of you who are members have seen it. Lord Balfour and Mr. Kipling and I have not seen it yet, but we know that it is after seeing it that you all get that look on your faces which comes to no other faces. As we have been told that we are presently to be led by the master of the company to another Dlace to see the ghost, you may now look on the faces of the three of us as we are for the last time. "The ghost, I understand, is a scrap of paper which proves conclusively that Bacon did not -write Shakespeare. So far good, but —I get this from the Ladies' Shakespeare^—Bacon was not the only author in that household. This document, as I am told, and will soon know for certain, is signed by Shakespeare, and is in these words: 'Received from Lady Bacon, for fathering her play of "Hamlet," £5.' '"It eounds terrible, but, ladies and gentlemen, there is a bright side to everything. For instance, let mc sit down."

Mr. Kipling.

The Master of the Company, Mr. Richard Bentley, after proposing the health of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, added, with a smile, "The number of his works has endeared him to every paper maker, printer and bookbinder in this country," (says the London "Daily Express"). Mr. Kipling said that the fact that he was now a stationer duly watered and obligated, was a heavy responsibility, for one could not deny that the world might have been happier if stationary had never been invented. "It must have been a brother of our mystery—an original hieratic stationer —who first discovered that if the leaves of the papyrus plant were soaked in the muddy waters of the Nile anu beaten upon with a mallet, the beastly stuff stuck together and maae what looked like paper.

In the Nile Valley.

"So we called it paper and we supplied it as stationery, and men began to write upon it with reed pens. When in the course of time we had rooted every green thing out of the valley of the Nile; when we had killed the fatted calf and the un fatted calf, and the calf unborn, to make vtllum, we tore the very rags off the backs of beggars, and we ground them and we pulped them to wake more and more stationery.