Pinero: Life in the Theatre

ELT 38:2 1995 Black Girl in Her Search for God and treat this as a 1933 work although the book's writing and initial publication occurred in 1932. They also use three-digit numbers to identify works so that, to avoid constant flipping back to the key, one must remember that plays are numbers 085 through 145, that Collected Letters are numbers 081 through 084, and that the five complete novels are (in order neither of their publication nor of their composition) 080, 156, 158, 159, and 312. To confuse matters further, they present quotations from fiction in dramatic format . Although "SMILASH: . . . she ketches me round the neck, not knowin' me from Adam the father of us all. . .." looks as if it might be from a play, it is actually from Shaw's last completed novel, An Unsocial Socialist. A system employing intelligible abbreviations (such as tihose Bevan used) rather than nonreferential numerals would have provided a more reader-friendly format. The chief defect of this book is that it is hard to determine what use it might be to anyone. It is not helpful to Shavians because it says practically nothing new about Shaw. It is not helpful to other paremiographers because its methodology is both undefined and unsound. The compilers surmise that their book may perform a service to posterity by "registering ["proverbial texts"] as first citations for later lexicographers of such phrases," but this will be true only if their book survives many existing concordances and primary texts. Shavians and paremiolqgists alike will have to let posterity draw its own conclusions. Fred D. Crawford ________________ Lansing, Michigan Pinero: Life in the Theatre John Dawick. Pinero: A Theatrical Life. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1993. xix + 434pp. 30 illustrations $37.50 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW labelled Pinero, once their tempestuous earlier exchanges had mellowed, "an Enigma" since Pinero refused to comment on his plays and Shaw thought it was about time he started giving himself away. Pinero wrote back that as Shaw himself was an enigma to many (but not to him) and Shakespeare had been another, he felt himself "in excellent company." In many respects his most recent biographer, John Dawick, found Pinero an enigma, as would any scholar given the lack of extant personal correspondence by a very private individual. Since little is known of Pinero's private life, Dawick appropriately focuses on his theatrical life. 248 book Reviews Divided into four acts, with prologue and epilogue, Dawick's book traces the course of Pinero's public life and works, with especially good views of his life as an actor in the resident companies of the Provinces and of London in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Early on one gets the sense from his letters that if it can be said of anyone it can justly be said of Pinero: the theatre was his life. He writes of little else. He is either just coming from or going to the theatre—preparing to act or see others act in his early years; playwriting, casting, directing, or planning those ventures in his later years. In his "Act 1, Preparations," Dawick affords us glimpses of Pinero as a stage-struck young law clerk in the early 1870s, spending his lunch time gazing at the windows of the Garrick Club, of his youthful explorations of the old Sadler's Wells Theatre (the background of his Trelawney of the "Wells"), of his studies in elocution at the Birkbeck Institution, and of his starry-eyed devotion to a variety of actresses. He also chronicles the first major turning point in the prospective playwright 's career as a general utility actor with Edinburgh's Theatre Royal and Liverpool's Royal Alexandra Theatre, and provides a useful examination of the nineteenth-century stock company, the star system, and the amazing number of roles an actor would perform in a few weeks' time. Of special interest are the young Pinero's meeting the old stage legend Charles Matthews and working with those who would become legendary: John Hare, Edward Sothern, J. L. Toole, the Kendalls and the Bancrofts. But the principal players in this act, apart from Pinero, are The Chief...