A.P. Riemer approaches Shakespeare’s comedies primarily through an examination of their cultural background, rather than with the aim of giving a coherent, detailed account of his own response to them. He believes they are ‘antic fables’ in two senses. First, they are old, and ‘represent cultural attitudes which the modern world does not share in any considerable measure. So the ‘mode’ which these comedies demonstrate’ should be understood primarily in terms of the contemporary culture (Renaissance Platonism is seen as particularly illuminating in this respect). Second, they are ‘essentially playful’ and ‘decorative’: a person claiming to feel something more serious, or to detect patterns of moral significance at the base of these plays, is making a fundamental mistake. They are ‘spectacularly jesting extravaganzas’. Professor Riemer specifically excludes Troilus and Cressida, and the comedy in Henry IV, from consideration: the former, which he calls ‘unclassifiable’ and the latter, which Coleridge spoke of as ‘mixt drama’, could not properly be included in a book which treats Shakespearean comedy as occupying a ‘province’ of its own. Professor Riemer repeatedly calls that province ‘cloud-cuckoo-land’, and he looks at all the comedies including All’s Well, Measure for Measure and the late romances largely in terms of comic conventions, traditions and modes.

How one actually feels about these comedies is left as a secondary consideration. Whereas Professor Marsh based his account of the late plays largely on his own lively, urgent and variegated responses, Professor Riemer responds with unvaried, emphatic enthusiasm. He speaks of the dazzling skill’ and the ‘jewelled, memorable world’ of Love’s Labour’s Lost: of Measure for Measure as ‘an example of theatrical virtuosity’; and of the comedies generally as ‘fascinating and glittering works of art’. No wonder Professor Riemer, in one of his most interesting remarks, speaks of these comedies as ‘essentially meaningless’.

Sydney University Press has begun to publish a series of editions of Shakespeare’s plays for Australian schools, under the general title, The Challis Shakespeare. A. P. Riemer’s edition of Macbeth is the first in this series. He has edited this play on the general principle that the First Folio, which provides the only text of Macbeth we have, should be followed wherever it makes sense (except in matters of spelling and, to a lesser extent, punctuation). This principle should have been established as unassailable many years ago, but it is interesting to see just how many of the readings here depart from the ‘standard’ texts of editors like W. J. Craig and Peter Alexander. It is good to know that editions of other plays will be based on comparable principles, even when (as in the case of Hamlet) the situation facing the editor is much more complicated. The Challis Macbeth is furnished with a useful introduction and appendix; its notes, mainly glossarial, appear at the foot of each page where they belong.

The second play in the Challis series is The Tempest, edited by G. A. Wilkes. Like Professor Riemer, he rarely departs from the First Folio text. In an introduction distinguished for its clarity, caution and alertness, he argues against a rigorous critical ‘probing’ of the play’s significance, which he feels must ‘test the fabric unduly’. While he allows that losing and finding. trespass and forgiveness, decay and renewal have their part in The Tempest, he thinks they are secondary. As Professor Riemer argues that ‘patterns of evasion’ prevail in Shakespeare’s comedies, Professor Wilkes sees ‘pattern’, ‘artifice’ and ‘elegance as the chief characteristics of this play:

What stands out is its ritual quality, the way a pattern is made to prevail, and made to prevail as a pattern … It is a play of mood and music and spectacle, tantalizing in the issues it raises, but always self-sufficient in its own artifice and elegance.