Shakespeare's Playhouses by Herbert Berry (review)

378Comparative Drama emphasis. Himself both scholar and director, S. E. Gontarski includes two of his own essays in addition to an original introduction. The "page" section of the volume divides itself between the heftier prose works—Murphy (Rubin Rabinovitz), Watt (Lawrence E. Harvey), Mercier and Camier (Eric P. Levy)—and the more recent, leaner writing —How It is (J. E. Dearlove), The Lost Ones (John Pilling), /// Seen III Said (Marjorie Perloff), and Worstward Ho (Dougald McMillan). Two chestnuts from the 1950's are included here: "Molloy's Silence," by Georges Bataille (1951), and "Where Now? Who Now?" by Maurice Blanchot (1959). Scholars will probably be more interested in the "stage" section, however, which brings together a number of interviews and directors' notes on the longer plays—Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days ("MacGowran on Beckett," by Richard Toscan, "Blin on Beckett," by Tom Bishop, pieces by Alan Schneider, Herbert Blau, Walter D. Asmus, Ruby Cohn, and S. E. Gontarski)—as well as pieces on the briefer, more recent dramatic work: Not I (Paul Lawley), That Time and Footfalls (Walter D. Asmus), Footfalls (James Knowlson), the radio drama (Martin Esslin), Rockaby (Enoch Brater), Ohio Impromptu (Pierre Astier), and Quad and Catastrophe (S. E. Gontarski). In a "preliminaries" section, Gontarski includes three essays: "Beckett and Merlin," by Richard W. Seaver, "Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts," by Dougald McMillan, and "When Is the End Not the End?: The Idea of Fiction in Beckett," by Wolfgang Iser. A coda, on "Burr with Beckett in Berlin," edited by Victor Bockris, frames the collection. Any collection that looks to include a representative range of criticism on a representative sampling of the Beckett canon must, to some extent, be arbitrary. Yet Beckett's work so consistently bears his signature that a reading of the volume is an experience in internal intertextuality. One meets recurring characters, motifs, techniques, allusions as one moves from prose to drama, from texts of many words to texts of few. Though the essays span four decades and are the work of a variety of scholars and directors, the hand of the editor is clear and sure. For the beginning scholar, the volume offers a sampling of criticism that establishes the patterns of Beckett's work; for the veteran, it provides ready accessibility to a valuable selection of essays. All three collections, then, are valuable, in their own ways: Burkman for its focus on a significant aspect of Beckett's work; Acheson and Arthur for new analyses of newer texts; and Gontarski for its suggestive connections and for its facilitating accessibility to important pieces of Beckett criticism. JUNE SCHLUETER Lafayette College Herbert Berry. Shakespeare's Playhouses. Illustrations by C. Walter Hodges. New York: AMS Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 260. $34.50. In the opening sentence of his handsomely illustrated collected essays on the Elizabethan playhouses, Herbert Berry strikes the keynote: "Much of what we know about Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses as buildings comes at random from documents about something else." Reviews379 One recollects Polonius' advice to Reynaldo about how through "indirections " we "find directions out." Through the "indirections" of legal trivia, we seek out the "directions" of the lost playhouses concerning which there have been vast speculation and little hard data. Made of tile and timber and thatch and scattered throughout greater London in Shoreditch, Southwark, and Blackfriars, (he mystery of their shape and design has challenged good minds for decades. Now Herbert Berry's work, along with that of Andrew Gurr (Playgoing in Shakespeare's London) and John Orrell (The Quest for Shakespeare's Globe), signals that the search continues. Sam Wanamaker's plan to build a replica of the Globe on Bankside adds fresh interest to this ongoing enterprise. And C. Walter Hodges' brilliant sketches in this volume reify these lively conjectures. Berry's book concentrates on the legal documents generated in connection with or ownership of The Theater, Globe, and Blackfriars. The road taken is through laborious scrutiny of frequently unsorted and often unobliging records. As Berry points out, probably no one has taken the trouble to re-examine these papers for decades. In the early twentieth century Charles W. and Huida Wallace and Mrs. C. C. Stopes, rival...