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Book Reviews 245 fire which gutted the old building in 1951 , consuming many scripts, prompt-copies and other papers. Hunt also lists productions at the new Peacock theatre from July 1967 to the end of 1978. The lists enable one to follow the rise of Abbey playwrights, and to note how few non-Irish plays have been produced there. Curiously, though, Pinter's The Homecoming was done at the Abbey five years before anything by Beckett was put on there; Waiting/or Goda/ did not get an Abbey production until 1976, though Film and Play were on at the Peacock in November 1967. This detailed yet concise history is a welcome addition not only to previous accounts of the Abbey, but to such general surveys as MacLiamrn6ir's Theatre in Ireland (1969) and Michael 6 hAodha's book of the same title published in 1974, not least because much of the illuminating comment in Hugh Hunt's book derives from his sound understanding of the economics of theatre and the dynamics of committee work. His discussion of the special problems of Ireland's national theatre and its directorate gives us a more complete view of that theatre than would an account devoted entirely to the theatrical art developed at the Abbey. ANDREW PA.RKIN. UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA JEAN CHOTHIA. Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Cambridge University Press 1979. pp. 243. The major decision facing the critic writing about dramatic language is, simply put, how much drama, how much language: how to combine critical discussions about the play with linguistic analyses of the text so that one does not overwhelm the other, or as Andrew Kennedy said in Six Dramatists in Search ofa Language, how to synthesize "rigorously descriptive and value bearing methods." Kennedy's book, published in 1975. concluded that in such studies, ''The attempt to 'stiffen' practical criticism with linguistically informed analysis of style seems one promising direction." Given the growth of research in structuralism, linguistics, and semiotics as tools of literary and dramatic analysis, one would expect a bookon dramatic language, published in 1979, to make some use of these aids. Jean Chothia's Forging a Language: A Study afthe Plays afEugene O'Neill does not. In her Introduction, she mentions the need to "adapt and extend our critical language about drama" (p. 5), but instead of employing any of the numerous critical "stiffeners" available, she relies on what she calls "intuitive jUdgement" (p. I I). The result is a work badly in search of a structure. The central concerns of the book are "to demonstrate that language of prose drama can be flexible and complex, can contain a finely patterned organic imagery that might justly be called 'poetic'" (p. (3), and to dispel what Chothia calls "the realistic fallacy" which holds that "dramatic language should and could be transparent" (p. 10). In order to demonstrate the richness and complexity of O'Neill's language, she divides his works into three general categories: (I) American low-colloquial used in plays up to 1924; (2) Standard American English of the middle period between 1925-1934; and (3) Irish dialect or Broadway slang intenningled with idiomatic modes of Standard American English in the plays written between 1939- 1943. After offering background comments in Chapter One: "O'Neill and the American Theatre," and Chapter Two: "O'Neill's Literary Biography," Chothia begins to employ Book Reviews the schematization in the middle of Chapter Three: "The American Vernacular in the Early Plays." Unfortunately, so much space is given to setting the scene- sixty-four of the 197 pages of text - and the conclusions reached are so often general - "O'Neill's vision of life is permeated by the literature he has read" (p. 47) - that there is very little room for the kind of exegesis of plays that Chothia does so well. For instance. she has only fifteen pages to discuss all the early plays and is, therefore, forced to squeeze an excellent discussion of the verbal tensions in All God's Chillun Got Wings into a few pages (pp. 72- 74). Repeatedly throughout the book, there are comments such as, ''There...

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