THE critic who is also a poet is generally the best critic of poetry. The history of English literature affords numerous examples of this happy marriage of creative faculties; unfortunately, we have comparatively few men today who have given sufficient evidence of their abilities in both capacities to warrant their being accepted as inheritors of that tradition. None, however, would question Mark Van Doren's right to be so described.

It is difficult to define precisely the unique excellence of this book. It is primarily a collection of brief essays about the plays and poems, essays which never exceed fifteen pages in length. Mr. Van Doren deliberately excludes considerations of Shakespeare biography, Elizabethan drama and the like; the center of his preoccupation is always the peculiar interest of each play.

This is a book without "theories" about the plays, and I enclose the word in inverted commas because the book is in fact crowded with theories which are carefully to be distinguished from the stuff of doctoral theses. Mr. Van Doren's comment on Falstaff's style is a case in point: "(Falstaff) being old and fat, he is short of breath and so must be brief of phrase . . . He has made the most of this limitation. Artist that he is, he has accepted its challenge and employed it in effects that express his genius with a notable and economical directness. His speech then is not merely brief; it is repetitive, it rolls back on itself, it picks up its theme and tosses it to us again, with rich improvements." This is a kind of theorizing which is surely in a class by itself.

The range of interest of the essays which make up this book is as great as the range of the plays themselves, whose subject is after all the whole world. One of the finest is the treatment of "The Tempest," of which its author says, "'The Tempest' does bind up in final form a host of themes with which its author has been concerned." What the play does for the Shakespearean canon, this essay does for the book which it brings to a lovely and harmonious close.

Mr. Van Doren turns from time to time to Dr. Johnson, but not, in the scholarly fashion, to buttress a point: it is rather as if he had found in that practical, intelligent and independent critic a turn of mind often not dissimilar to his own. Independence is indeed the keynote of Mr. Van Doren's book. In putting behind him the apparatus and techniques of scholarship, he has dared to do what few other critics have done: he has come face to face with Shakespeare. He has recreated the Shakespearean world, and one would like to quote the entire book to show how well a wise, sensitive and exquisite mind has adventured among masterpieces.