The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama by G. Wilson Knight (review)

BOOK REVIEWS THE GOLDEN LABYRINTH: A STUDY OF BRITISH DRAMA, by G. Wilson Knight, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1962, 402 pp. Price $6.00. The Golden Labyrinth is bound to become an indispensable book for the student of British drama. G. Wilson Knight surveys the British drama from its spiritual beginnings in antiquity and its local beginnings in the Middle Ages to about 1950. There is less of the rhapsodic than in most of Mr. Knight's other writings, and the critical intelligence displayed is always sensitive and acute. As far as it goes, the book is definitive, especially as one thinks of Mr. Knight's fairness and soundness of judgment and his imaginative transplantation into the sensibilities of a myriad of writers. He also has a genius for the exact, revealing, aesthetically compelling, and unhackneyed quotation. The passages chosen illustrate the touchstone method of criticism at its happiest, since they are not only challenging in themselves but indicate by implication the quality of the play from which they are drawn. It is possible to have reservations about Knight's ritualistic and psychological theory of the drama which he applies to the English dramatists whenever he can do so. At that, one is not disturbed by Knight's use of his theory since deftness, tact, and sophistication determine the extent to which he applies it to a given author. Rather, Knight asserts his ideas instead of fully discussing them. Although he could hardly do more than this in a short book, one still would wel~ come a more extended elucidation of his principles. He contends that, basically, the drama unites the Dionysian and Appolonian tendencies, which Nietzsche found basic to the culture of the ancient Greeks, into a tense and radiant harmony. Often the Dionysian principle is embodied in the dark, demonic, Satanic, compulsively egoistic individual who has an urge to achieve power, psychological more than physical, over his polar opposite, the idealistic, seraphic youth or maiden, the visible representative of the spiritual, the ineffable, and the numinous. Dionysus and Apollo may fuse within the psyche of the complex protagonist of Renaissance and modern literature or within a dynamic sexual relationship. In either case, the masculine and feminine qualities merge; and the individual psyche or the sexual union aspires to a transcendent state that is "bisexual" in nature. Knight's ideas are applicable to many plays, especially to those that are not predominantly realistic. Knight is persuasive, for example, when he discusses, with his theory in mind, the Elizabethan drama with its archetypal villains, archetypal victims, and titillating sexual disguises. To some extent, Knight's theory .is also appropriate for Ibsen in whose typical plays an intense hero works out his own destiny as it relates to a woman who is either helper or destroyer, or both. Knight with some justice also maintains that Shaw partly illustrates his theory, since Shaw insists that man must go beyond sex to an immersion in "the vortex freed from matter," "the whirlpool in pure intelligence." Knight's ideas are less applicable to that kind of stylized drama which is, in essence, a critique of social manners. Knight realizes that this is so and throws aside his theoretical formulations when he discusses Restoration comedy. His views, however, find some substantiation in the ambiguous sexuality of the women and the tormented aspirations of the men in "heroic drama" of the Restoration. 231 232 MODERN DRAMA September I shall not be able to consider Knight's perceptive CrItiCIsms of the major English playwrights and the revaluations which he suggests as necessary for the writing of a critical history of the English drama. Yet we cannot fully understand Knight on the modern drama unless we also know something of his earlier discussions , the luminous critiques, for instance, upon the Greek drama, Shakespeare, Webster, Chapman, Dryden, Congreve, Lee, Sheridan and Byron. Knight is, furthermore, sensitive to the merits of the poetic drama of the nineteenth century, especially the plays of Coleridge, Byron, and Tennyson. As a result, the nineteenth century was richer in dramatic literature than we may have suspected. If the closet drama lacks the practical stagecraft to make it fully effective in the theater...