Twenty Modern British Playwrights: A Bibliography, 1956 to 1976 by Kimball King, and: Ten Modern Irish Playwrights: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography by Kimball King (review)

116 Book Reviews the qualification of "provisional" as applied to the substance of his work, or to think of his carefully crafted pieces as "ephemeral in workmanship." Valency's strength lies in his broad view of modem theatre and in his feeling for and understanding of significant work in the period before midcentury. His preference is revealed by the number of pages devoted to two solid prewar authors. In 436 pages of text, Pirandello receives a full 121 and Giraudoux, 103 (fully halfthe book for these two authors), while Beckett gets short shrift with thirty. Perhaps this is dODe purposely, for Valency early on claims that, ambiguity being an essential element in Beckett, Ionesco and Mallanne, it is a disservice to interpret their works. Valency has certainly taken a much more positive attitude toward the theatrical avant-garde of the •50Sand '60s than he took twenty years ago. In 1960 he described this theatre as a "flight into lunacy," and claimed that it had contributed nothing of major importance. Godot he characterized as "long, futile and unbearably repetitious," and he branded the entire avant-garde as a theatre of no ideas, avid for novelty (Theatre Arts, August 1960). In The End of the World, he now admits the worth of these authors. He calls Les Chaises a masterpiece and "one of the great plays of the contemporary theatre." Of Beckett he says, "Few writers of our age have had words so completely at their conunand," And yet the reader senses a certain reluctance, betrayed in such declarations as, "There is, indeed, not much to be said about Happy Days," or in the unfair suggestion that Beckett's bitterness "was, in some sense, his literary capital, an investment which afforded a rich return all the rest ofhis life." In concluding, Valency states, "The modem Symbolist has nothing to conceal. His work is as obscure to him as to anyone." If we would quarrel with emphases and opinions expressed in the I 08 pages devoted to Artaud, Ionesco and Beckett, we are willing to suspend our disbelief for the earlier chapters. There, in his usual graceful, witty style, chiseled, lapidary, epigranunatic ("Obscurity is a form ofsilence that enables one to shout without being heard"), Valency treats dramatists who are apparently closer to his sensibility. Here we recognize and admire the author of The Flower and the Castle and other masterful studies of the founders of modem theatre. Short chapters on Mallarm~ and Maeterlinck lead into the major studies of Pirandello and Giraudoux, clear, perceptive, illuminating. One might quarrel with the choice ofthese particularauthors for the major focus of(he book, or regret the exclusion of dramatists like Yeats and Larca. But there is no denying the importance and influence of Pirandello and Giraudoux, and Valency makes a good case for their Symbolist ties and offers them as contrasting approaches to that aesthetic, one a realist enamored of the ideal, the other an idealist enamored of the real. Let us hope that his volume will not be the last, as Professor Valency intimates, in the distinguished series of books on modem drama he began in 1963, LEONARD C. PRONKO, POMONA COLLEGE KIMBALL KING. Twenty Modern British Playwrights: A Bibliography, 1956 to 1976. New York: Garland 1977. pp.xiii, 289. KIMBALL KING . Tell Modern Irish Playwrights: A Comprehensive AnnotatedBibliography . New York: Garland 1979. pp. xiii, III. Kimball King's two annotated bibliographies ofcontemporary English and Irish dramatists , though marred by errors, omissions and aberrations, are not only useful but in Book Reviews 117 certain respects impressive. Carefully revised, they could become models oftheirgenre. To an extent they cry out for comparison with E.H. Mikhail's Contemporary British Drama, 1950-1976: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (Totowa, N.1.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977; reviewed in the June 1979 Modern Drama) , But King's work comple· roents more than it competes with that of his well-known predecessor. Whereas Mikhail (rather perversely) includes material about drama and theatre in Great Britain but not about playwrights, King deals with playwrights alone. While both scholars cover their respective areas quite comprehensively. King - using a team of University of North Carolina research assistants (in contrast to Mikhail, who apparently...