The Abbey

ELT AA : 4 2001 mons' gross failings in translation. Shaw's insistence that intellectual passion transcends any physical passion was unintended as paradox, and unsatisfying to the French psyche, which also rejects—Pharand cites André Maurois here—"a melding of the comic and tragic." That Shaw realized his inaccessibility to the French is clear from his remarks to Augustin Hamon about French disgust "with this mixture of comic & serious, which seems to them a barbarous confusion of artistic genres." With Englishmen, he quipped elsewhere, "you must make them believe that you are appealing to their brains when you are really appealing to their senses and feelings. With Frenchmen you must make them believe that you are appealing to their senses and feelings when you are really appealing to their brains." Perhaps only a play like Godot, by his Irish compatriot, larded with a grotesque humor alien to Shaw's sensibilities, could manage both. One of the bonuses in Pharand's book will be its least-read closing pages—"A Chronological Bibliography of Works by and about Bernard Shaw in French and on Shaw and French Culture and Literature." It will be a major research asset. One of the bonuses more immediately to be appreciated is the smooth and unobtrusive appearances of Pharand's translations from French as they seem useful page by page. Always informative , Shaw and the French is often, too, an entertainment. Stanley Weintraub ______________ Pennsylvania State University The Abbey Robert Welch. The Abbey Theatre 1899-1999: Form and Pressure. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xii + 280 pp. $59.95 WHILE MEDITATING this review of Robert Welch's onehundred -year history of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, I happened also to be reading Robert D. Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, in which he traces the persistent and murderous ethnic hatreds apparently endemic to the communities of the former Yugoslavia back to the massacres and betrayals of their medieval past. And I couldn't help being struck by the obvious parallels with that island nation to the west of Great Britain, obsessed by the myths of its own nationhood, haunted (as Kaplan's title suggests) by dead heroes, traitors and martyrs, trampled for centuries by the familiar oppressor—not Habsburg or Ottoman, but English—and riven by internal sectarian hostilities fomented by that oppression. 490 BOOK REVIEWS But I wonder if any other nation, with a population no larger than that of several American cities, has also had a theatre which has enacted in so many hundreds of plays, decade after decade, its besetting antagonisms and compulsive mutual torments. Has the theatre in any other culture furnished such an unending succession of vivid and controversial representations of every corner of its national life, past and present, rural and urban, well-to-do and impoverished, Catholic and Protestant? Has any other nation had a theatre so pivotally situated in its intellectual and imaginative core, that any play running for a matter of weeks could be seen and reacted to by virtually the entire opinion-forming cohort of the capital city? Surely no other culture has had a drama which is so obsessively preoccupied by its own history and politics and psychic travail, to the exclusion of almost any other subject. And to the extent that this is true, Irish drama seems much less susceptible to translation and transplantation than, say, the plays of Ibsen or Chekhov. Hedda and Nora may be recognizably Norwegian, but they can be acted in many different places and languages. Whereas it is hard to imagine Juno and the Paycock playing in Oslo, in Norwegian. The language and the context of O'Casey and his many fellows seem to be too culturally specific to be exportable. And one has to wonder how much these recurring representations of Irish life have actually helped to reinforce an inescapable sense of collective character-as-destiny. For an overwhelming impression to be derived from Welch's exhaustive synopsis and appraisal of hundreds of plays, by scores of playwrights, is that life in Ireland has consisted almost entirely of bitter and despairing strife among generations of weak, thwarted, obdurate , rapacious, vindictive, and more-or-less deranged sufferers. Here is his synopsis of...