You Never Can Tell by Bernard Shaw (review)

1969 BOOK REVIEWS 455 YOU NEVER CAN TELL, by Bernard Shaw, with an Introduction by Margery M. Morgan, Hicks Smith & Sons, The Gateway Library, Sydney, Australia, 1967, 160 pp. Price $1.15. Margery M. Morgan, of Monash College, Clayton, Victoria, writes that this new edition of Shaw's You Never Can Tell "is intended primarily as a senior school or first year university text," but that she has also used this opportunity to "get across" what she hopes is a "fresh approach." She has established her right to make this claim chiefly on her linking the play to the Commedia dell' Arte and the Christmas pantomime traditions, with their Harlequins and Columbines (Philip and Dolly), "the unmasked lover and lady of the Commedia dell' Arte plots" (Valentine and Gloria), "Pantaloon in a new disguise" (Crampton), "a version of the learned Doctor" (M'Comas), "a physical resemblance to Mr. Punch" (Bohun, Q.C.), and "like the French Pierrot" (William the Waiter). Although the masquerade scene in the last act gives the clue in the costumes of the terrible twins as Harlequin and Columbine, it is surprising that no previous critics seem to have carried out this hint. Even Martin Meisel in his Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater, whom Professor Morgan mentions in passing, has failed to pursue this analogy, although he does discuss the Christmas pantomime, The Harlequinade, in connection with Androcles and the Lion. Professor Morgan calls attention to the fact that the comic dentist pulling a tooth, as Valentine does at the end of the first act, was a favorite farcical scene in the pantomimes and music hall shows. Her attempt to establish Bohn, Q.C., as a sort of last act deus ex machina, suggested by Euripides, Shaw's friend Professor Gilbert Murray, and Greek tragic ritual, is much less successful, and her paralleling of the five members of the Clandon-Crampton family with the five members of George Carr Shaw's family has already been done by such Shavian biographers as St. John Ervine and R. F. Rattray. The text of this new edition is dependable, except that the editor has spoiled one of Shaw's methods of giving instructions to his actors as to how he wants their lines to be read, in addition to his standard detailed stage directions: she has not realized that when he wants a word stressed he spaces his letters instead of italicizing them, and when she doses the spaces she loses the emphasis; and when he wants Dolly to speak in a breathless torrent of words to her brother early in the first act, he omits all marks of punctuation-which Professor Morgan has carefully inserted. ARTHUR H. NETHERCOT Northwestern University AMERICAN THEATRE, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1967, 228 pp. Price $5.75. This collection of historico-critical essays offers surgical cross-sections, cut through at various angles, of the world of twentieth-century American drama. As such it is well conceived. There are historical surveys such as that by the late John Gassner and by Richard Duprey; there are individual studies of the major dramatists, as well as of recent minor but promiSing figures; consideration is given the realistic, poetic, expressionist and absurdist schools; there are studies of such special phenomena as the Group Theatre, the influence of Europe, and the impact of commercialism on both the themes and the conditions of contemporary theater. ...