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358 MODERN DRAMA December upon the Elizabethans, and both playwrights sought a comparable variety of tone and technique. Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold believes that both playwrights write parables (a word she confusingly interchanges with allegories), and that both delineate their characters socially rather than psychologically. Thus, she feels that Arden is Brecht's heir in a more profound sense than Osborne. And her book thereby acquires a neat progression from Brecht's non-influence on Auden, to his merely technical influence on Osborne, to a deeper affinity with Arden. Her analysis is well worth condensing and translating into English (at which time English typographical errors might be corrected). Now that her doctoral duties are fulfilled, Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold should be free to find a more viable form for her pronounced critical intelligence. RUBY COHN California Institute of the Arts THE LATE PLAYS OF EUGENE O'NEILL, by Rolf Scheibler. Bern, Switzerland: Francke Verlag, 1970.222 pp. $8.50. O'Neill's stature rests in large part on his genius as a fearless innovator. Of course, his experimentations did not always come off, but he did succeed artistically as well as commercially with such plays as The Hairy Ape, The Great God Brown, The Emperor Jones, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra. Curiously enough, however, it is O'Neill's last and dramaturgically least innovative and most conventionally structured plays which later audiences have seemed to prefer and which O'Neill himself esteemed most highly. He wrote Lawrence Langner that The Iceman Cometh is "one of the best things I've ever done, ... perhaps the best," and in 1943 he maintained to Barrett H. Clark that this play and Long Day's Journey into Night "give me greater satisfaction than any other two [plays] I've ever done." It is these two plays as well as A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten which Rolf Scheibler examines in The Late Plays Of Eugene O'Neill. Considering O'Neill as a poetic idealist and a moralist playwright working in the tradition not of Strindberg but, rather, of "Ibsen's naturalistic style and analytical method," Scheibler sets out to "show" two things about these four plays: (1) that O'Neill's "ideas about modern society and life are clear, and clearly presented "; and (2) that a "strange light of comfort emerges out of O'Neill's desolate dramatic world." In these four plays, Scheibler says, O'Neill depicts a personal sense of "happiness" and "belonging." To O'Neill, according to this reading, such happiness comes from man's acceptance of reality and, however temporary or artificially (i.e., by means of alcohol or drugs) induced and sustained, the subsequent contentment is real, commendable, and valuable. Scheibler describes O'Neill's dramatic structure in these four plays as a dual one in which the familiar change "from bad to worse, from comparative brightness to utter darkness," constitutes only one-an "outer"-situation that is juxtaposed with a second and more important one "The: creation of insight and vision emerging out of the despair." This juxtaposition, Scheibler says, is "musical," and helps account for O'Neill's often criticized repetitions. According to Scheibler, this actually constitutes O'Neill's method of stressing emotions by lingering on them-a dramaturgical equivalent of the musical theme and variations. While Scheibler's hypotheses and conclusions are extensively developed, they do not really account for the plays' continuing appeal, nor are they always even 1971 BOOK REVIEWS 359 tenable. Sometimes Scheibler forces dramatic situations and characterizations into a preconceived interpretation, however unaccommodating the actual evidence may be. Nowhere is this weakness more striking than in Scheibler's analysis of O'Neill's two masterpieces. The great appeal of The Iceman Cometh and of Long Day's Journey into Night must lie at least in large part in something that Scheibler, curiously enough, never even alludes to, much less examines: the assumption and depiction of very contemporary, post-O'Neillean sensibilities. To buttress the "pipe dreams" into which they escape a world too frightful to face, O'Neill's characters rely on drugs or liquor-or they surrender despairingly to a reality which they cannot finally escape...

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