The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 22.0098  Wednesday, 1 June 2011

From:         Tom Bishop < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >
Date:          May 30, 2011 11:57:53 PM EDT
Subject:      Query on an Old Edition

Dear Colleagues,

A colleague researching New Zealand writer Robin Hyde has sent me the following query, which I have been unable to answer. It would appear to concern a one-volume edition of Shakespeare, probably a Collected, available in Wellington, New Zealand, around 1920, of which the only distinctive detail recorded here is the frontispiece.

Does anyone on SHAKSPER have a suggestion?

Thanks,
Tom

>I am looking for the edition of Shakespeare that Robin Hyde had. She
>is writing here in 1934 but her edition ( a Collected) seems from this
>comment was bought when she was at school in the early 1920s. (See
>below for description) Any idea?

Hyde (whose real name was Iris Wilkinson) writes:

"Writing trash that rhymed was sheer Hell at first, at college.  (Mother started me on that downward path, some time during the war.)  At College, it very naturally made me a foolish sort of  freak, and it certainly didn’t justify itself—But the others were so very bad, that I scooped the pool of really good monetary prizes, bestowed by an obliging Literary Club, one good feature in a bad school.  You had to spend the money on books, but it was Heaven going into Whitcombe’s and buying smooth new desirables—Spenser, Omar, Keats—one of the white-headed company, Shakespeare, is with me here and now, and the line beneath the frontispiece might be significant:

    Iris:     “I met Her Deity
                Cutting the clouds towards Paphos.”

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