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1967 BOOK REVIEWS 217 terpretation, Richard Moody has studied romanticism on the American stage and has edited a voluminous anthology of nineteenth century American plays, and now Walter Meserve brings together a highly useful collection of essays on native playwrights and themes. The allocation of space in this collection of twenty-one essays immediately attracts the attention of the reader. Fourteen essays are the work of critics; only seven come from the pens of actual playwrights. This apparent disproportion is probably additional proof that American dramatists are seldom articulate about their own technique or goals. Maxwell Anderson and Arthur Miller have written provocative statements about their own craft; O'Neill, on the other hand, was notoriously reticent, and Clyde Fitch, Sidney Howard, and even Thornton Wilder have said relatively little about their work. In other words, the bulk of the anthology is the work of professional reviewers or academic critics. Three essays concern O'Neill, and there are single discussions of Howard, Miller, Wilder, and Lillian Hellman. Larger topics dealt with include the American verse drama from 1916 to 1939, the defects of American drama as literature, and American realistic playwrights-a label that Mary McCarthy applies only to Miller, Williams, lnge, Chayevsky, and Elmer Rice (for one play, Street Scene). The contributors to 'this section of the book include Lionel Trilling, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Robert Brustein. Every anthologist (and the present reviewer is as guilty as others) is culpable of omissions and is sometimes illogically blamed for including items which another editor would have rejected. One man's meat is almost certainly another man's poison. Nevertheless, one wonders about the policy of selection. There is nothing here from Stark Young, Brooks Atkinson. John Mason Brown, George Jean Nathan, or Kenneth Tynan. One or two of the academic criticisms could surely have been spared, if space was a serious question, to permit the representation of such writers. Certainly Atkinson's reviews for the New York Times over a long period of service lend distinction to American dramatic criticism, while a Nathan tirade might have lent color to a collection which is sometimes drab. One wonders why no discussion of the work of Rice, Odets, Williams, Green, and Barry appears. The American verse drama is an interesting theme, but is it substantially more important than the proletarian plays or the folk plays, both of which are excluded from consideration? Here especially there seems to be a lack of balance. Despite such reservations, nevertheless, this book has substantial merit. It brings together material from many sources: Miller's preface to his Collected Plays, O'Neill's letter about the Great God Brown, Albee's journalistic bit about the theater of the absurd, contributions to academic quarterlies concerned with the modern theater. Some of these items would be difficult for many readers to obtain. A collection of twice the size would be more comprehensive but probably better proportioned, yet it would still include some of the material which Professor Meserve has incorporated here. JOHN T. FLANAGAN University of Illinois HISTOIRE DES SPECTACLES. Ed. Guy Dumur, Encyclopedie de la Pleiade, Librarie Gallimard, Paris, 1965, 2010 pp. Price $11.50. Volume XIX of the French Plciade Encyclopedia is a record of several kinds of celebration, and is itself cause for celebration. Over fifty specialists (preponderantly 218 MODERN DRAMA September French) have contributed to this survey of scenic display, from the earliest ritual observances to recent television methods. I have read nearly half of the two thousand closely packed pages, and I have read nothing uninformed, nothing unintelligent . The book's organization plan is itself revealing. One-fifth of the volume describes pre-theater and extra-theater "Spectacles of Participation." Civic, religious, aristocratic, and popular celebrations all provide their spectacles, as do pageants, combats, and sports. Then follow some hundred pages on the Oriental Theater, in eight articles: China, India, Southeast Asia, Viet-Nam, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Islam. Over half the book-about 1200 pages-is given to Western Theater. The umbilical Greek theater is discussed not by a classicist, but by Roland Barthes, France's New Critical viewer and re-viewer of drama. Even familiar facts are illuminated by his brilliance: the problematical...

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