Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson and John Pilling (review)

Book Reviews 559 trying to define ideas, critical ideas about society and about human activity; trying to define those as precisely as possible, not necessarily in verbal terms but in pictures'" (p. 273). Hay and Roberts show how each play centers on amajor image and uses a series of minor images to enhance the major image (e.g., the wall in Lear enhanced by Lear's blinding and the ghost. among other images). Comments on parallels with and differences from Brecht are equally enlightening concerning Bond's dramatic method. For Bond, as for Brecht, "Characterisation is rooted in social rather than personal relationships" (p. 247), and "Like Brecht, Bond wants the audience to react analytically to the incidents he shows" (p. 280). Yet Bond breaks with the Brechtian tradition of epic theatre because, "instead of seeking to distance the audience from the events by interrupting the action, Bond talks ofthe need to involve the audience by surprising and shocking them with images which are part of the continuing action" (p. 280). IronicaUy, one of the book's strengths is also one of its weaknesses: sometimes the scholarship is overly fastidious. Even the most devoted reader of Bond learns more than he wants to know ofthe innumerable changes Bond made in his plays as he progressed from his notes, successive drafts, and rehearsals. The first third of Chapter Five. for example, focuses too much on the notes written in preparation for Lear, and we learn in Chapter Eight that Bond had many different ideas about how Shakespeare should die in the six drafts that Bond wrote for Bingo. This attention to detail does not always add to an understanding of the plays. In concluding their study, Hay and Roberts observe that Bond's theatre can be properly understood only in the context of his desire "'to make the analysis of politics partofthe aesthetic experience'" (p. 287). Bond:A Study ofHis Plays quite successfully shows how politics and art can be merged without sacrificing artistic merit. Moreover, the book leaves no doubt that the dramatic renaissance begun in British drama by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 continues to grow stronger as it remains faithful in its examination of society's ills. DANIEL R. JONES, EMBRY-RIDDLE AERONAUTICAL UNIVERSITY JAMES KNOWLSON AND JOHN PILLING. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama ofSamuel Beckett. London: John Calder [979; New York: Grove Press [980. pp.xx, 292. This study of the late prose and drama of Samuel Beckett actually begins with the early prose and drama of Samuel Beckett. Its plan may strike one at first as quirky if not contingent, since its authors pass over (deliberately) the "major" Beckett to focus on the before (the unpublished Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Eleutheria, and Beckett's early critical writing) and the after (the drama after Endgame and the prose after the trilogy). Further, the authors avoid merging either prose styles or critical approaches. The result is very different emphases in the prose and drama chapters. Pilling is more the schematizer, as he admits, than is Knowlson: "our love ofpattern," he confesses in the editorial third person, is "almost more pervasive than Beckett's." The fruit of such love is a lucid, systematic account of the late prose, from How it is on (and Book Reviews Pilling achieves similar results with Beckett's criticism in an appended essay. "A Poetics of Indigence"), Knowlson's interest may be as much theatre as drama, as much performance as text, and while he focuses less on Beckett's developing thought and aesthetics than does Pilling. he brings to bear on his analysis a mass of new information from what are fast becoming the author-ized productions: from major performances that all too few ofus have seen; from watching Beckett direct his own work; from interviews with performers and other theatre folk; from Beckett's annotated scripts and directorial notebooks which form an invaluable part of the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading Library. home ground for both these scholars; and from his personal correspondence with Beckett. Knowlson too shares Beckett's love ofpattern. Following Beckett's directorial lead, he focuses...