A Theater in Your Head by Kenneth Thorpe Rowe (review)

1961 BOOK REvIEWS 103 dramatic structure, brilliant individuation of character even among the minor roles in a sizable cast-these are his strong points. Add to this a directness of language-found as well in Strindberg the novelist-which affords a real challenge to any translator owing to the speed and at times almost intolerable immediacy of the Swede's linguistic image and situation. English usage is perhaps more veiled and given to indirection. At all events, an adequately translated Strindberg is swiftly paced. The two dramas noticed here are not on a par, for although the tragedy of Sweden's 15th century Tell, the national hero Engelbrekt, was one of Strindberg's favorite works, it lacks the subtlety and interest of his handling of King Magnus Eriksson of Norway and Sweden (1316-74), the troubles of whose reign are almost proverbial, and whom Strindberg makes to atone in his own person for the notorious crimes and passions of numerous generations of his own clan, the wily, gifted, and unscrupulous Folkungs. The age of the Folkungs was Sweden's equivalent to the War of the Roses. Professor Johnson has most admirably transmuted Strindberg's expressive, blunt Swedish into the complex materials of which English idiom is composed, and indicated corrections are very few. One such occurs at the top of p. 63, where "... H you dare" should read "... on whether you dare." On p. 64, the unsatisfactory phrase "you didn't get the ability" should read "the ability didn't go with it." On p. 65, in Ingeborg's last speech, an ambiguous colloquial pronoun has misled the translator: for "now he's moving" read "now it's moving." The curtain is meant. An excess of modesty has kept the translator from tackling Strindberg's occasional unpretentious verse, for which reason the "song of the smiths" is ineffective and well nigh pointless. The translator's tidy historical comments omit one fact of note which, to be sure, would have bothered Strindberg little had he known of it, and that is that Magnus and his ancestors were not Folkungs at alll Swedish historians have recently disposed of the asserted relationship between Earl Folke and Magnus' ancestor, the regent Earl Birger. Playgoers will not care. ERIK WAHLGREN University of California A THEATER IN YOUR HEAD, by Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1960, 438 pp. Price $6.95. A Theater in Your Head offers, according to its dust-jacket advertisement, "a complete dramaturgy for the reading of plays, from experiencing the play by visualization of production, through understanding by analysis, to the final pleasure of evaluation by principles of criticism." This is a reasonably accurate summary of the book's contents. The phrase, "a complete dramaturgy," is probably just a publisher's boast; but this book does indeed include a survey of theatrical arts and crafts; a lengthy consideration of dramatic structures, forms, and styles; and finally the complete text of a previously unpublished play, Theodore Ward's Our Lan', which Professor Rowe analyzes exhaustively. As a primer of dramaturgy, A Theater in Your Head will be used principally in college classrooms, where it may help somewhat to effect an armistice in the Lilliputian struggle between the forces of drama as "pure" theater and those of the drama as "pure" literature. To achieve such a reconciliation would require a fresh approach to the aesthetics of the form and a reappraisal of its historical and anthropological development - certainly no light undertaking. Professor Rowe's book does not go this far. Instead, in the portion of the book dealing with "experiencing the play by visualization," he offers an ample restatement of the old idea that dramatic art has theatrical production as its ultimate end and 104 MODERN DRAMA May that it is, therefore, important to know something about the theater in order to read plays intelligently. No drama critic would feel called upon to take up arms against this conclusion, but it may be only an innocuous half-troth-if not a "half-truism"; for it is extremely doubtful that a knowledge of stagecraft will help readers to better understand those plays which live principally as 'uterary" ideas cast in the dramatic form...