Das Moderne Englische Drama by Horst Oppel (review)

1965 BooK. REVIEWS 467 consequences. Peer Gynt, on the other hand, seems to Knight successful because be is kind to .his dying mother and is consistently true to his code of cowardice. By ignoring techniques, Knight fails to realize that Ibsen constantly shifts between allegory and realism in Brand; he cannot conceive the idea that Ibsen means Brand to be symbolically" heroic and victorious while literally and realistically defeated. Similarly, since he misses the sharply satiric techniques of Peer Gynt, he does not recognize the implicit satire of Peer, his escapism, even in the death scene with his mother. In assuming that Ibsen is essentially realistic, Knight tends to reject some of the more important subjective, romantic, and imaginative elements in Ibsen', best plays. He cannot, for example, see the heavy weight of symbolism in Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and Lady from the Sea, but sees in the first two realism "shadowed by occult powers," and in the last "an ambiguous realism" through which "an intuition of the occult expresses itself." And by assuming Ibsen's essential Shakeipearian objectivity, Knight discovers objectivity and artistry in the most unlikely places, the most loose and SUbjective conceptions. This is why he sees that in Lady from the Sea, "the opposition of nightmarish sea-terror and a loveable doctor is a stroke of exact artistry." Perhaps the trouble is that Knight assumes Ibsen is too much like Shakespeare. He places Ibsen in what he calls "the central line of western drama" descended from the Greeks and Shakespeare. He constantly draws parallels between Ibsen's characters and Shakespeare's. And, most important, he uses essentially the same method of interpretation on Ibsen's plays that he has always used on Shakespeare's. His interpretation "tends to merge into the work it analyzes," to "translate the work into discursive reasoning." As T. S. Eliot indicated in his introduction to Knight's Wheel of Fire, Knight's method of interpretation is helpful in treating the work of a great artist who, like Shakespeare, has no "clear philosophical pattern ," but not in treating the work of a great artist like Dante and Lucretius (and, I might add, Ibsen) who "sets out with a definite philosophy and a sincere determination to guide conduct." Ibsen's plays express a bold, if sometimes confused , philosophy of life. His ideas are generally obvious; the art by which they are expressed, not so obvious. To approach his plays as Knight does Shakespeare's. that is, to translate an Ibsen play "into discursive reasoning," is often merely to restate and to overvalue its themes. IRVING DEER University of North Dakota DAS MODERNE ENGLISCHE DRAMA, Interpretationen, herausgegeben von Horst Oppel, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Bedin, 1963, 380 pp. Price DM =8. ($7.00) Since this book is written by Germans in German and for Germans, it is of only limited value to American readers. The editor and his contributors are professors of English at German universities who have combined their efforts in order to introduce their countrymen to the British and Irish drama of the last seventy years. There are altogether nineteen interpretations of individual plays by leading dramatists from Shaw to Wesker. They are sound, solid, "middle of the road," i.e., combining biographical information and traditional historical research with a certain minimum amount of aesthetic and structural analysis. The book will be useful for German high school teachers and univesrity students, possibly also for young "Dramaturgen" (literary consultants and editors) at the more than =00 publicly supported theaters in both East and West Germany, 468 MODERN DRAMA February Austria, and Switzerland. It does achieve what it sets out to do for German readers. To expect more abroad would seem to be unreasonable. Because the limited scope of Mr. Oppel's undertaking rules out startling origi· nality as well as dazzling scholarship, American readers are likely to be most interested in the German perspectives of this anthology. The editor's two cri· teria for selection were: (I) "which plays hold a key position in the development of modern English drama, and (2) which plays are likely to last on account of their artistic qualities?" It is here that Anglo-Saxon critics might challenge the choices of...