Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare ed. by Edwin Wilson (review)

468 MODERN DRAMA February Among church dramatists Dr. Weales shows special admiration for the plays of Charles Williams and places him next to Eliot and Fry, although his plays have not, like theirs, gained a general public. There is a curious assumption among some younger playwrights today that religion does not belong to the modem world. Robert Bolt in his Preface to A Man for All Seasons, which might have been included in Dr. Weales's book if it had been produced a year earlier, explains why, in a drama of our time in which "we are rightly committed to the rational," he treated "Thomas More, a Christian saint, as a hero of selfhood." Yet is it not possible, even probable, that for a large number in the audiences of A Man for All Seasons it was the validity of the religious experience of Thomas More (his road to selfhood), as dramatically created by Robert Bolt, which made the more direct contact and gave power and conviction to the play? Emphasizing a progression through the past fifty or sixty years, Dr. Weales's conclusion is that today "Religious ideas are as acceptable as any other ideas in the commercial theatre," depending like any ideas on the dramatic effectiveness of presentation. KENNETH THORPE ROWE University of Michigan SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF BERNARD SHAW'S WRITINGS ON THE PLAYS AND PRODUCTION OF SHAKESPEARE, edited, and with an Introduction, by Edwin Wilson, New York, Dutton, 1961. Price $4.50. Everyman. Paper $1.75. Edwin Wilson has brought together the great majority of Shaw's significant comments on the plays, dramatic methods, productions, and interpreters of Shakespeare . The volume is unquestionably a welcome one. We now have the familiar but scattered pieces, plus a few that are relatively elusive, conveniently at our fingertips, assembled and arranged to be read straight through. We can at last absorb Shaw's observations on Hamlet, for example without first tracking down six different sources. Wilson's introduction sums up his subject in fourteen businesslike and uncontroversial pages; it lacks only a bibliography to make it an excellent propaedeutic for the uninitiated. The edition does not aspire to the quality of Walter Raleigh's Johnson on Shakespeare (not to speak of T. M. Raysor's job on Coleridge), but it is one that we will buy, use, and presumably profit from until something better supplants it. It could not have been a complete edition ·by a long shot. Dan Laurence's Soho bibliography of Shaw, his microprint edition of the early writings, and his series of reprints (touched off with How to Become a Musical Critic) will unveil a whole new corpus of obscurely published Shaviana. Shaw's unpublished letters, another long-term Laurence project, will inevitably touch upon Shakespeare here and there. It would have been futile for Wilson to duplicate Laurence's monumental labors just for the sake of a Dutton appeal to the bulk of academe. Still, Wilson might have included everything of note that scholars have already recorded. He appropriated an amusing letter on The Taming of the Shrew from Archibald Henderson's final biography, but he either missed or chose not to print two equally interesting items (see pages 143 and 699). At the April 25, 1884, meeting of the Browning Society (chaired by James Russell Lowell, who unfortunately did not clash with Shaw), Shaw extemporaneously compared Shakespeare's Caliban with Browning's. Henderson omits Shaw's most illuminating words, which 1964 BOOK REVIEWS 469 are worth re-exposing. After declaring that Browning is "essentially undramatic" in contrast -to Shakespeare, Shaw continues: Now, there is a difference between the faculty of the dramatic poet and that of the epic or descriptive poet, and ·they are often strangely divided . The epic poet has a theory of the motives and feelings of his characters , and he describes his theory. The dramatic poet, whether he has a theory or not, instinctively puts the character before you acting and speaking as it would do in actual life. The merely epic and descriptive poet cannot do this. Milton had not the dramatic faculty very strongly; Shakespeare had. In music Beethoven was destitute of it; Mozart possessed it...