Granville Barker

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 useful additions are the appendices of old photographs and manuscript pages of "The Mirror" adorned with sketches. These permit even the casual student to observe the transformation of real images into artistic ones, though on this matter Hall is characteristically silent. To these two supplements he has attached the designations "More" and "And Even More," reminiscent of Beerbohm's practice in assigning titles to his collections of essays, having already published his Works in 1896. Again the knowledgeable editor becomes the collaborator, no longer explaining or elucidating, but amplifying. This is to say no more than that another editor would have conceived his task somewhat differently. In the final analysis it is the superb reproduction of the original drawings accompanied by the solid background information, if not interpretation, of Hall's commentary that recommends the book. Collectors may still be advised to keep their eyes open for copies of the first edition. But no student of Beerbohm , of caricature, of Victorian literature, or of the elusive relationship between memory and imagination should be without this one. Ira Grushow _______________________________Franklin & Marshall College_________ GRANVILLE BARKER Plays by Granville Barker. Dennis Kennedy, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Cloth $42.50 Paper $14.95 Until recently, Harley Granville Barker has been a figure more read about than read, and, even when read, known principally as the author of the Prefaces to Shakespeare, those wise essays bridging the gap between Uterary scholarship and theatrical practice, the beginning of a tradition reaching forward to such present-day figures as J. L. Styan and Peter Brook, to name only two. The recent work of such scholars as Eric Salmon, C. P. Purdom, and Dennis Kennedy himself serves as a corrective to such a narrow evaluation of Granville Barker's important place in the development of modern British theatre. Salmon's collection of Granville Barker's correspondence, though incomplete and in some respects flawed, is an important contribution to our understanding of how active a participant in theatrical production Granville Barker was. Dennis Kennedy's new collection of plays by Granville Barker advances the restoration of the reputation of this Edwardian "Renaissance man," establishing the significance of his dramatic output once and for all. As Kennedy suggests in his insightful introduction, Granville Barker "was a minor dramatist in at least one sense: he wrote few plays" (1). Kennedy's collection presents three of his full-length plays, stemming 93 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 from his earliest individual effort to two plays of his dramaturgical maturity: The Marrying of Ann Leete (1899), The Voysey Inheritance (1903-4, revised version 1912), and Waste (1906-7, revised version 1927). These three plays comprise the major works of Granville Barker's dramatic canon, with the exception of The Madras House (thought by some to be his most accomplished play). Though Granville Barker wrote two additional full-length plays later in life, neither was ever performed and opinion seems to be divided as to whether they were intended as closet dramas or not. While it would have been useful to have The Madras House in the collection, Kennedy's reasons for excluding it are certainly defensible: of the major plays, it is the only one presently available in what Kennedy calls a "responsible recent edition" (26), which in the interests of space can therefore be omitted from the present volume. Most readers probably regard Granville Barker the playwright as a minor cousin to Shaw, with whom his theatrical career is inextricably linked. There is certainly reason to connect the two: Granville Barker appeared in major roles in such Shavian masterpieces as Candida and Mrs. Warren's Profession and directed (or co-directed) others of his plays. Both men committed their lives to leading British theatre out of the Victorian era of gaslit melodramas and "well-made" plays, using elements of those forms for new, often more spiritually and intellectually demanding ends. The critique of the specific society in which they lived was a common rhetorical end, as was an exploration of timeless questions and situations. Yet, Kennedy successfully argues, to see Granville Barker as the less important of the two is an incomplete perspective...