Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama by John Russell Taylor (review)

358 MODERN DRAMA December function of its restricted focus. Oedipus the King is no more typical of Greek tragedy than Ghosts is of Ibsen or of modern drama in general. But Clark, under Fergusson's influence, writes as if they were and thus falls into his second basic error, a simplistic view of modern drama which makes Yeats appear to swim against the current instead of taking his rightful place in the main stream. In the second sentence of his opening chapter Clark steps off on the wrong foot: Modern drama, being directly responsible to an audience more representadve than that which has encouraged modern poetry, has more distinctly suffered from contemporary distrust of the imagination. An age in which .people derive their view of life from science and commerce has produced a realistic and naturalistic drama having the force of fact but lacking the imaginative power and richness of traditional poetic drama. Not only is this quite untrue of lonesco, Beckett, and Genet, but it is equally untrue of any dramatist writing in Yeats's lifetime whom we would do the honor of comparing with Yeats: Ibsen (author of Peer Gynt, Brand, Lady from the Sea, and When We Dead Awaken, among other works ignored by Clark), Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Chekhov, Gide, Shaw, Wedekind, Kaiser, Claudel, Lorca ... , the list is practically endless. To say, as Clark does, that Yeats "has been more suc· cessful than any other modern dramatic poet in meeting the crisis of his age" (p. 106), without having first compared him carefully with any of his contemporaries, let alone all of them, seems to me parochialism in excelsis. Inevitably, Clark's book has certain merits traceable to ,the very narrowness of its frame of reference. For example, it contains what must be the most thorough analysis extant of The Words upon the Window-Pane. I for one have always tended to slight this playas an unwise attempt on Yeats's part to imitate the Abbey Theatre's lowest common denominator of circumstantial realism. Helen Hennessy Vendler, whose scale of dramatic values seems diametrically opposite to mine, rates the play very high but says, "It does not present the same difficulties as the other late plays ... and I think any commentary on it . . . is unnecessary ." Clark refutes us both by showing that it retains elements of the Noh drama and achieves a richness of texture usually thought incompatible with the prosaic convention it superficially adheres to. We can also be grateful to Clark for his detailed analysis of the versification in Purgatory, the play in which Yeats at last freed himself totally of Tennysonian blank verse. My only quibble is that Clark finds too many survivals of 'the pentameter among Yeats's unrhymed tetrameters. For instance, "Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne" need not be given five stresses. "Aughrim-and-the-Boyne" is an Orangeman's political cliche, to be rattled off at high speed, and has no more right to three stresses than, say, "and-the-pursuit-of-happiness." The best pages in this book (pp. 13-16) summarize Yeats's overall development as a dramatist. They could have provided the outline for a more old-fashioned type of book that might have suited Clark's talents better than the aesthetic theorizing and symbol-chasing (which itself is getting a bit vieux jeu) that he has here imposed upon himself. VIVIAN MERCIER The City College of the City University of New York ANGER AND AFTER: A GUIDE TO THE NEW BRITISH DRAMA, by John Russell Taylor, Methuen &: Co. Ltd., 1962, 287 pp. Price 30s. There are certain key dates in the history of the English theatre: one is 2 September 1642, the closing of the theatres, another is 19 October 1741 when 1964 BOOK REVIEWS 359 Garrick made his first appearance as Richard III, and now Mr. Taylor bids us add another to the list-8 May 1956, the first performance of Look Back in Anger. Furthermore he sees the success of this playas marking a turning point not only in theatrical but also in literary history; authors who previously would have used the novel form now turn to the drama for self-expression. We...