The New Bibliography of Modern Drama Studies

THE NEW BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MODERN DRAMA STUDIES TWENTY-ODD YEARS AGO THE LITERATURE on modern drama, or at least the literature worth more than a glance, was minute. Today it is huge. The student of the early forties could pretty well get by on a diet of pure Gassner (Masters of the DralJ114 first came out in 1940), supplemented by a few items of heavy German scholarship in Monatshefte or Scandinavian Studies and an occasional touting of a new "discovery" in one of the plush little magazines. Apart from mere ground-covering historical accounts, three or four useful biographies of the most classic moderns, and a heap of theatrical memoirs and collections of play reviews (thos'e blights of our field), surely no more than fifteen English-language books existed in 1945 that were solid or suggestive enough to rate more than scanning. One, of course, was Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism; another was the study of Ibsen by his friend, Georg Brandes. Just a few more deserved to make the required reading lists: Weigand on Ibsen, Dahlstrom on Strindberg, Vittorini on Pirandello, Winther on O'Neill, Krutch's The American Drama Since 1918, and a regrettably forgotten book on Shaw by Holbrook Jackson. During the war years, substantial British and American works on modern drama, even articles, were as scarce as promising British and American playwrights. Eric Bentley seems to have spurred the big change. No doubt indebted to Gassner (who else was around?) and strongly influenced by the New Critics (his 1951 critical anthology, The Play, was a highly creditable foster-child of the 1945 Brooks-Heilman Unde1'standing Drama), Bentley parleyed his broad knowledge of modern literature , his combined theatrical and analytical training, his first-hand' acquaintance with members of the current avant-garde (especially Brecht), and his own glittery brand of stylistic brilliance, into the still-exciting piece of diatribe and revelation published in 1946, The Playwright as Thinker. His little book on Shaw published the following year was almost equally seminal. Meanwhile a few men of the Gassner-Bentley stamp, though taking all drama for their province, began to give modern plays close and respectful attention. Ronald Peacock treated Buchner, Chekhov, Hofmannsthal , and others in The Poet in the Theatre (1946); Alan Thompson dealt with Ibsen and Shaw at length in The Dry Mock (1948); and Francis Fergusson analyzed plays by several moderns 49 50 MODERN DRAMA May in The Idea of a Theater (1949). Still, by 1950 almost no modern drama specialists existed as such, and the durable studies that trickled out-Tennant and Downs on Ibsen, Ringley on Chekhov, Irvine on Shaw, and a number of journal articles-presented, to say the least, no urgent problems of bibliographical control. The period 1951 to 1956 brought the deluge. Three successors to Bentley's pivotal work appeared (none as good): a translation of Martin Lamm's Modern Drama, Raymond Williams' Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, and Frederick Lumley's Trends in 20th Century Drama. Alan Downer, in Fifty Years of the American Drama, 1900-1950, tried to find some hope on the home front. Books on major figures became commonplace, and for the first time in years full-length analyses of second-run playwrights-Anouilh, Cocteau, Maeterlinckfound publishers. In the little magazines, the Brecht rage yielded to the Sartre rage (or vice versa) and then to the Beckett rage, though from old habit T. S. Eliot continued to reign supreme. Updated editions of Masters of the Drama and The Playwright as Thinker came out. Gassner and Bentley cashed in further on the exploding interest by tossing their occasional writings into striking volumes: the thick Theatre in Our Times by the old master; In Search of Theater, The Dramatic Event, and What Is Theatre? by the new. In restrospect, the mildly reactionary lectures of Joseph Wood Krutch in 1953 ("Modernism " in Modern Drama) and of Gassner three years later (Form and Idea in Modern Theatre) look like vain attempts to squelch the unbalanced concentration on ultracurrent drama that followed. After Carleton College weaned TD'R into active life in 1957 and the University of Kansas gave final sanction to the field with the first issue of...