The Elizabethan Theatre VIII: Papers Given at the Eighth International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre Held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in July 1979

J.V. Rahilly was an engineering librarian in Ontario.

Because 1979 marked the quartercentenary of the publication of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, the major theme of the Elizabethan Theatre Conference here was the “pastoral” and its various forms as found in the theatre. The nine papers are contributed by American, Canadian, and British scholars. They begin with A.C. Hamilton’s reassessment of Spenser’s epic. Three different colleagues comment on the impact of the pastoral on some of Shakespeare’s plays, while Anne Lancashire writes about the pastoral as entertainment. Other papers deal with the last production of the Corpus Christi plays in Coventry, and with dramatists in France and Italy.

There is even an index, which is a rare commodity in a book of conference proceedings. This is obviously an important collection of papers for the theatre library, for the Elizabethan and Shakespearean expert, and for those interested in drama generally. But it probably would be best to acquire all of the previous proceedings as well, and not just this one in isolation.