English Drama, 1900-1950: A Guide to Information Sources by E. H. Mikhail, and: Contemporary British Drama, 1950-1976: An Annotated Critical Blbliography by E. H. Mikhail (review)

210 BOOK REVIEWS of the playwright to forgive and punish the same characters, or collapses completely in later plays when the playwright sentimentalizes all his characters . Louise Blackwell's essay, "Tennessee Williams and the Predicament of Women," suffers from a similar problem: a too-simplistic categorization of Williams's major women characters (up to 1961) as combatants in a continuous fight to find a mate or keep the one already found. The difficulty stems from the generalization on which it is based: the theory that Williams's thesis through 1961 was that most people find meaning in life through satisfactory sexual adjustment. Another kind of myopia is evident in "Postscript 1976," added by Roger B. Stein to his "The Glass Menagerie Revisited: Catastrophe Without Violence." In the postscript, Stein criticizes Williams and American writers in general for ignoring the social aspects of life, thus apparently not writing drama that can be adequately interpreted by Marxist criticism. The main body of Stein's essay, however, still stands as a useful interpretation of the "religious overtones" of The Glass Menagerie: in the world of the play, "The church has been struck by lightning, and all hope of resurrection has been lost. . .. " Thomas Adler's second essay in this collection argues that Williams offers a challenge in the face of that hopeless world: "We must be like God to the other and the other must be like God to us." Gilbert Debusscher, in "Tennessee Williams' Lives of the Saints: A Playwright's Obliquity," focuses on yet another way in which significant Williams's characters "resonate with broader [religious] overtones," in their resemblance to saints- Valentine, Sebastian, Laurence, and Christopher. For Nancy M. Tischler , those resonances- mythic and otherwise- are a problem for Williams when they are used to pronounce truth rather than reveal it. Her valid point is somewhat weakened, however, by her dependence here, as in her other criticism of Williams, on a psychological interpretation that too closely equates Williams with his characters. In addition to reminding scholars of some of the best that has been written aboHt Williams, and some of the continuing difficulties, this book can provide beginners to Williams studies with a sense of the variety of critical opinion his work has provoked. Most importantly, this book, together with A Tribute, raises intriguing possibilities for further study of Williams's work. JUDITH HERSH CLARK University of California, Davis ENGLISH DRAMA. t900-t950, AGUIDE TO INFORMATION SOURCES, by E. H. Mikhail. Detroit: Gale, 1977. 328 pp. $18.00. CONTEMPORARY BRmSH DRAMA, 1950-1976: AN ANNOTATED CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY .by E. H. Mikhail. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. 147 pp. $16.50. Edward H. Mikhail is surely the best-known secondary bibliographer in the field of modem British drama. He has now published nine bibliographical volumes, among them a classified list of material on the social and cultural setting of the 1890's, a checklist of dissertations on Anglo-Irish drama, and bibliographies of Synge and O'Casey studies. Along with his 1972 Bibliography of Modern Irish Drama, 1899-1970, his new contributions, covering British BOOK REVIEWS 211 drama from Shaw to date, would seem on the surface to represent the culmination of his labors, the finished mosaic he has been putting together for years. But things are not always what they seem. In this case, the actual products fall so short of what their titles and blurbs imply that it is hard to make the necessary recovery from the letdown, acknowledge the limited scope the bibliographies take as their province, and realize that each one covers its area in a highly professional- if not very practical- manner. English Drama, 1900-1950 is the eleventh in a series of volumes issued by Gale Research Company, each with the clumsy subtitle A Guide to Illformation Sources.' It was no surprise to find that Mikhail's work, despite its title, includes a great deal of material on theatre as well as drama: Englishdepartment purists like me are the only people who cling to the distinction. But I was genuinely disconcerted to learn that the drama and theatre of Ireland are fully represented-as if no Dubliner or Ulsterite would mind being labeled...