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394 BOOK REVIEWS structures, semiology. Stressing that language is only one detail of the total theatrical effect, Jacquart examines his dramatist's predilection for verbal oppositions, stichomythia, repetition, associational rather than logical dialogue. He analyzes the oral quality of their language, as well as the new theatrical importance of stage silence. Following Umberto Eco, Jacquart maintains that plays of Derision are deliberately "open" or polysemic. With a minimum of jargon, Jacquart attempts to describe the "code" of the Theater of Derision, which he finds is sensual and theatrical, rather than verbal and logical. Finally, Jacquart swiftly summarizes more contemporary theater, from Arrabal to Grotowski, which seeks to escape from literature. Retrospectively, then, the Theater of Derision is the last theater movement that can be linked with literature . Jacquart's book is a useful and systematic analysis of its history, methods, and attitudes. RUBY COHN University of California, Davis, SIX DRAMATISTS IN SEARCH OF A LANGUAGE: STUDIES IN DRAMATIC LANGUAGE, by Andrew K. Kennedy. Cambridge at the University Press, 1975. xiv & 271 pp. $6.50 paper, $16.50 hardcover. In the conclusion to this book of rich insights into the word struggles of modern English playwrights, Andrew Kennedy makes a plea for the development of a method of criticizing dramatic language. His book is a challenging essay at this desirable object. Yet his title implies a search for the illusory: and so it turns out to be. Moreover, the reader's own implicit search beneath Kennedy's excellent arguments is for some whole notion of what language must be and do in a play, for what makes it different from the language of a novel, or even of a packet of cereal. It is not until the penultimate page that there is a reference to the implications of stage communication in the "speech-act" - "the words uttered, the frame of utterance, and the effect of the utterance on the hearer" - and then only "in the play," not in the theatre. The mimetic power of words, the context of the theatre Dccasion, and their force acting upon a spectator's perceptions, are mIssmg. Kennedy points conclusively to a "crisis of language" in all the playwrights of his choice, a recurring exhaustion of the possibilities of one play style, and the hunt for its successor to meet the needs of a new play, a new subject, a new generation . Reassuringly, one remembers that such a crisis has been felt before - in Marlowe and Shakespeare, Dryden and Congreve, Goldsmith and Sheridan, oh, and in Strindberg and Chekhov, and all the rest. Is it not a proper crisis? A writer's activity of constantly cleaning house is part of the creative process itself, and we may presume that signs of the struggle with words in Shaw, Eliot, Beckett , Pinter, Osborne, and Arden, the author's chosen six, are vital signs indeed, especially in an age of Artaudian non-verbal theatre. Neither of these demurs invalidates Kennedy'S probing into the dramatic awareness of each of his authors, although Osborne, with his imperfect rhetorical control and self-dramatizing devices, sits uneasily in this company. The verbal poverty and dramatic limitations of outworn naturalism are the springboard to BOOK REVIEWS 395 each new attempt at evolving a dramatic language, but it is interesting to see that Shaw shared with Eliot and Arden the need to dip into "the imaginary museum" of earlier manners of stage speech: not in order that the text might control enactment as Raymond Williams once urged, but to range over the wide spectrum of styles between verisimilutude and the abstract. Whether by trivial conversation or parodistic patterns of speech and song, each seized his freedom of choice at once to control an audience's image of the play and self-consciously to express a personal feeling towards his theme. Shaw recognized his atavistic tactics, which on occasion could sink to Dickensian costume-speech (Pygamlion's Doolittle) or rise to an operatic afflatus of parody (Major Barbara, Man and Superman) most appropriate to "the great tradition of comedy." As for John Arden, in his search for a popular, pre-literary dialogue capable ofa kind of poetic energy, he pillaged the museum for archaism and pastiche...

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