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90 MODERN DRAMA May that Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen was inspired by an Irish literary tradition than by A Doll's House. Mr. Setterquist has found an Ibsenian parallel for the situation in each of Synge's plays, even for that most Irish of all stories, Deirdre of the Sorrows. But seeing in the death of Deirdre and Naisi something analogous to the situation in Love's Comedy in which Falk and Svanhild decide not to get married. but to go their separate ways, seems to be straining too hard to find a possible "source." It is also surprising to hear Mr. Setterquist say that Pegeen's final speech in The Playboy-"Oh, my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World"-is a direct borrowing from Hilde's "My-my Master Builder," in The Master Builder and that "This is ... in all probability the most literal example of Ibsenian influence in the works of Synge." (p. 70) Ibsen has undoubtedly been the most influential modern playwright, but this influence is surely not as allpervasive as Mr. Setterquist would have us believe. In his study of the influence of Ibsen on Edward Martyn, Mr. Setterquist is on safer ground. Martyn was a avowed admirer of Ibsen, and the traces of the Master in The Heather Field, Maeve, The Tale Of a Town, An Enchanted Sea, and Grangecolman are most convincingly demonstrated. In Grangecolman partie· ularly the echoes of Ibsen are loud. The very title recalls Rosmersholm, and both plays are set in a "lonely old county seat haunted by a family ghost." The central character of Grangecolman is a woman obviously modelled on Hedda Gabler; she even meets her death, like Hedda, from the muzzle of her own pistol. The very fact that it is so easy to find literary indebtedness in Martyn's plays is a good indication of how bad they are. None of the characters is given life; dialogue is wooden and unconvincing. 1£ only Martyn had been a better writer, and had assimilated his sources more thoroughly, Mr. Setterquist's study, admirable as it is, would have gained in value. It is not likely that the plays of Martyn will ever exist anywhere but in the limbo of historical curiosities. JOHN KELSON University of Kansas O'NEILL, by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1962, 970 pp. Price .$12.50' The past decade, in restoring Eugene O'Neill to his former eminence, has produced three fresh biographies: Croswell Bowen's The Curse of the Misbegotten (1958), Doris Alexander's The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (Winter, 1962), and the Gelbs' O'Neill (Spring, 1962). The last is the best, excelling the others in quantity and the old "standard" biography by Barrett Clark in quality as well. This the Gelbs have accomplished by six years of assiduous research which took them to hundreds of sources across the country. The result is a detailed, reliable life which begins with O'Neill's Irish immigrant forebears in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with the dramatist's death in 1953. Despite its amplitude, the book is not "definitive," as the dust jacket claims, in the sense that no singlevolume chronicle of so rich and varied a life could be. Bowen, for example. has an emphasis on the dramatist's relations with Agnes Boulton (his second wife) and their thildren which the present authors have in fact done well not to duplicate. Other volumes, in brief, will supplement the work of the Gelbs; none will displace it. The Gelbs offer few revelations not previously surmised; their contribution is to add the abundance of facts which give depth and roundness and pinpoint 1963 BOOK REVIEWS 91 accuracy to essentials already known. The account of O'Neill's parents is, if anything , too full. The Gelbs differ from Professor Alexander, their nearest com· petitor, in painting the elder O'Neills in harsher strokes, sparing neither James's self-absorption, alcoholism, miserliness, and grudging parental love, nor Ella's maternal and domestic indifference and her willing addiction to morphine. Miss Alexander also traees that addiction to an operation for...

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