LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 134, 8 June 1935, Page 24

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

London newspapers praise Mr. Jack Lindsay's novel, "Last Days With Cleopatra," which has been published by Ivor Nicholson. The author is the eldest son of Mr. Norman Lindsay, the artist.

The bells of me ancient cnurch of St. Oswald, in Grasmere, Westmoreland (where Wordsworth spent fifty years of his life), were heard in a broadcast to America on April 7, the anniversary of the poet's birthday.

The four folios of Shakespeare, sent by the Massachusetts General Hospital for sale in London, brought £3100 in Sotheby;s auction rooms. The four folios form a rare set of Shakespeare's plays printed about 300 years ago. The first volume was printed in 1623, the second in 1632, the third in 1664, and the fourth in 1685. Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach bought a similar set of folios last year for £21,435.

The silver jubilee of the Poetry Society has been celebrated in London by a dinner at which Alfred Noyes presided. The membership of the society includes as many as 3000 British poets, major and minor. There is great diversity in their everyday occupations and in their social status. One of them is a parlourmaid in the house of a high War Office official, another is a stationmaster in Wales, and a third is an octogenarian member of a business firm in the City of London.

The year 1935 marks the fourth centenary of the appearance in print of the first complete Bible in English. This was Coverdale's translation of 1535, sometimes known as The Treacle Bible on account of the rendering "Is there no treacle in Gilead." The Bug Bible is another name for it, from the translation in the Psalms, "Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night," though it is at the "treacle" rendering a copy lies open in the church of Minster in Kent.

Some years ago (says a contributor to the "Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News") a correspondence school of journalism achieved a brief notoriety by publishing the remark that "a preposition is a very bad word to end a sentence with." The writer, however, must now. pale his ineffectual fires beside the small girl who said to her nurse on seeing that the latter had brought a very dull book for the evening's reading: "Oh, Nanny, what did you want to bring that book i/ read to me out of from for?"

Eighty Americans, representing varied fields of endeavour, have formed themselves into a national committee to honour the 100 th anniversary of the birth of Mark Twain, which falls on November 30. The committee is under the honorary chairmanship of President Roosevelt. Among the observances which the committee will promote during the year is a nation-wide school programme, leading up to a "Mark Twain Day" on. November 1. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is expected to head a British committee.

Mr. Stephen Leacock has completed a book telling how it is done. In "Humour and Its Theory and Technique," the author maintains that the first joke known to mankind was the one which is still a favourite with the comic strip artists and the slapstick comedians. He says that the primitive man who first cracked the enemy over the head with a club and shouted "Ha! Ha!" was the first humorist. Having thus disposed of the first joke, Mr. Leacock goes on to say that the end of the world will be the last one. "All ends with the - cancellation of forces and comes to nothing, and our universe will expire with one vast, silent, unappreciated joke."

A great theatrical controversy has arisen over the performance of a modernised version of "Hamlet" at the Betty Nansen Theatre, Copenhagen (says the London "Daily Telegraph"). Mr. KajMunk, a young Danish dramatist, who is the clergyman of a small village in Jutland, has remodelled Shakespeare's play very freely, introducing a number of references to the present political situation. The main idea is "Something is rotten in the State Qf Denmark." Hamlet's father is represented to be a Prime Minister, and Claudius, who killed his brother through jealously, instead of poison uses electrical murder weapons or Press attacks. Forlinbras is a Fascist, who arrives in an aeroplane to save Denmark from the failure of democ-' racy and the Parliamentary system. -