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[08 Book Reviews it is directed toward the student and general reader. Inclusion of Yeats in the series is noteworthy because until recently the generally accepted critical view has been that Yeats's plays are untheatrical and esoteric. This book is consistent with a critical reevaluation of the plays begun in the mid-70s and with three well-received New York productions of Yeats's plays within the last year. It includes material which by its nature implies the viability as perfonned works Yeats himself always believed the plays had: there are numerous photographs of productions, descriptions of first performances. reviews and the author's evaluations of the plays as theatrical events. The book also, more predictably, includes an account of Yeats's life and work, of Yeats and the Abbey Thealre, and descriptions of the actions of the plays, their themes, and their sources. There is a very useful last chapter on relevant Irish history. The author describes not only each of the twenty-six plays Yeats chose to include in his Collected Plays, but also Yeats's four very early plays. With insight, he relates these rarely discussed plays and the translations of Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Coionlls, included in the CollectedPlays, to the more commonly studied Yeats plays. It seems unlikely that any general reader would have reason to read through the thirty individual discussions ofthe plays. However, these self-contained accounts, common to the books in the series, do constitute a very useful reference for both general readers and specialists. Because the book is meant to serve as an introduction to Yeats as a dramatist, the accounts of the plays are in effect primarily descriptive rather than heavily analytic. Yet that which appears to be straightforward description actually entails sophisticated analysis, because whatever argument can be made for the theatricality of the plays. their structures and intended effects are unfamiliar and their language is extremely dense. I do not find the author's account of The Herne's Egg convincing - I have never read a convincing account of that play. And I do not share his enthusiasms for On Baile's Strand, Deirdre, or The Only Jealousy ofErner. Generally, though, I find the author's descriptions and evaluations of the plays more reliable than those in many disquisitions which purport to be more analytical. The grouping of the plays into chapters on folk and morality plays, heroic and tragic plays, Noh plays, tragicomedies, and supernatural plays, while clearly not systematic, is by and large chronological and comfortable. I wish the penultimate chapter, summarizing Yeats's accomplishment as a dramatist, had given more weight to Yeats's important contribution as a dramatic theorist. Otherwise, the book as a whole constitutes a complete and well-written survey of Yeats's dramatic accomplishment. NATALIE CROHN SCHMITT, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, CHICAGO CIRCLE J .L. WlSENTHAL, ed. Shaw and Ibsen: Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism and RelatedWri/ings. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University ofToronto Press 1979. pp. viii,268. Any book entitled Shaw andIbsen promises a great deal. The connections between these two titans of the modern theatre and the conditions that gave rise to them and to Chekhov and Strindberg are only beginning to be explored. In his earlier work, The Marriage of Contraries, Wisenthal established the centrality of Ibsen and The Quintessence to Book Reviews 109 Shaw's evolution as a dramatist. This new edition of The Quintessence ofIbsenism and related writings by Shaw on Ibsen, together with a ground~breaking introduction, perfonns an essential scholarly task. Wisenthal raises and discards as irrelevant the tired cliches about Shaw's "distortion" of Ibsen. Shaw's lecture to the Fabian Society on 18 July 1890 used Ibsen's plays to warn against the empty abstractions of Hyndman's Social-Democratic Federation and "urged a pragmatic socialism, concerned with hUman needs rather than abstract principles." Wisenthal also stresses the contemporary impetus for the publication of the Ibsen lecture. He sees it as part ofShaw's reaction to the Parnell divorce case: "with its warning against judging conduct according to inflexible moral rules [it] was related to the Parnell debate - and in particular to the hostility toward Parnell shown by some...

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