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ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 critic I know, and he establishes unmistakably the psychic kinship between these two superficially unlike personages. As for Joan of Arc, Bertolini's presentation of her as standing for the creative imagination is convincing for Joan herself and for its bearing upon the artist (Joan herself is prototypically the artist) in his or her struggles, disappointments , and rewards. On balance, Bertolini's book deserves to stand with those I mentioned in my first paragraph. It may not generate the authority that its author might have wished, but the originality and penetration of its insights make this book a must for the student of Shaw. The book is for me something of a flawed achievement, but an achievement nevertheless. It contributes its part to the recovery of Shaw as a vital and vibrant artist for our own day and age. Frederick P. W. McDowell ___________________ University of Iowa Yeats and New Historicism Adrian Frazier. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. xxv + 258 pp. $25.00 ADRIAN FRAZIER's Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre is a recent addition to Stephen Greenblatt's series, "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics." As those familiar with the New Historicism or Cultural Poetics (the term Greenblatt prefers) know, the movement seeks to revise not only accepted narratives of history, but to rethink radically the nature of historical criticism of literary and other kinds of cultural texts. Though often colored by a Marxist or cultural materialist view of history, New Historicist studies typically reject any single account of historical causality or, indeed, any single attempt to find necessary or natural connections between historical events. More than anything else, New Historicism seeks to debunk the romantic myth of history as the valorization of the Great Man. Just as some strands of post-structuralism call for the "death of the Author" (i.e. Barthes and Foucault), so New Historicism is determined to dislocate historical meaning from the accomplishments or biographies of individuals per se. The individual becomes a disputed category, and the term "individual" itself a problematic word to be critiqued and interrogated. Frazier's aim, then, follows in the traditions of New Historicism (if so 350 BOOK REVIEWS loose and broad a "movement" can even be said to possess traditions). In his book, Frazier attempts to rewrite the history of the Abbey Theatre, indeed of the entire movement for a national theatre in Ireland from 1899, the year of the premiere of Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, to 1910, the year Annie Horniman severed, once and for all, her connection with Yeats, the Irish National Theatre Society, and the Abbey Theatre. As the title of the preface to the book suggests, the central question Frazier addresses is "Whose Abbey Theatre," posing his study as an answer to this question of contested sites of artistic and economic production. The conventional view has enshrined Yeats as hero of the narrative; Frazier's narrative suggests that there are no heroes, only potentialities, realized and unrealized in varying degrees, out of which Yeats emerges as one of the most complex, contradictory, and compelling figures. For Frazier, Yeats is the linchpin in the historical process, the master manipulator, always moving between poles of aestheticized self-interest and shrewd stage management, both literally and figuratively. While other figures emerge memorably, including playwrights such as Synge, Colum, and Yeats's close friend Lady Gregory, and actors such as the Fay Brothers, Mary and Frank Wright, and Sara Allgood, the most formidable character in this social and political drama is "the Englishwoman" or the "Quaker lady" (to use J. B. Yeats's term), Annie Horniman, the wealthy and eccentric heiress, whom Yeats first encountered in the occult and trendy Order of the Golden Dawn, and whose economic support of Yeats's theatrical endeavors provides much of the conflict in this history of the Abbey. Just as Frazier is committed to situating Yeats the artist within a social milieu and a materialistically determined process of production, so, conversely, he wisely sees the need to go beyond a stereotypical view of Horniman as...

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