The Shakespere Songs

PROFESSOR BROOKE was fortunate in obtaining Mr. de la Mare as introducer to his collection of Shakespere's songs. It is not very often that scholar and poet walk so happily together, although one detects a certain timidity on the part of the latter. For instance, Mr. de la Mare immediately warns us that the songs were composed for dramatic and practical purposes. There is danger in scrap-booking them out of their context and the conditions that made and found them so luckily essential.

Again, he reminds us that the songs were intended to be sung--and Professor Brooke's notes agreeably point their various musical settings; all Shakespere's language is that of poetry and ever akin to music. How much more so, then, in the case of the songs?

But these discomforts over, the remainder of Mr. de la Mare's essay expresses a sensitive poet's delicate admiration of these notes flung from the throat of the greatest songster of them all-the Muse's charm flowering in the lonely word, and the essential 'rightness' of this word that is Shakespere's and no other's. Screened through the younger poet's interpretation, we reread the songs with new delight.

Professor Brooke's scholarly paraphernalia is adequate and thorough as was to be expected from so expert a commentator. Some space might have been found for a discussion of Shakspere's relation to Lyly--not in the 'Pinch him' song of Falstaff's malaise where the comment suffices, but in the 'Hark! Hark! the lark' aubade from Cymbeline. The gloss ignores Trico's song in Campaspe.