A Companion to Pirandello Studies ed. by John Louis Digaetani (review)

Book Reviews purged," receive short shrift and, in a judicious introductory chapter, Shaw becomes 'the reference point for the new century's drama. "In claiming a direct social function for theatre, Shaw not only gave a strong political cast to the mainstream of English drama, but set its stylistic lenns." At the other end of the book stands an equally effective analysis of the way "Beckett's drama can be seen as an extension of the symbolist line in British poetic drama from W.B. Yeats to T.S. Eliot." One could regard that (though Innes doesn't) as a fe-discovery of a theatre that is neither didactic nor narrative: an antidote to what Dennis Johnston called " the honeyed poison of G.B.S." And surely Pinter shares the poets' transcendental vision. Innes groups him with the subversive comedians and, in consequence, reduces him to •'the most consistent - and in a sense limited - of modem British playwrights in his subject matter." That literal view does demonstrate the connections between the threatening double-talk of early plays and the bullying officialdom of late plays like Mountain Language: " the psychology of politics ." a worm's eye view of the boot (hat crushes it." The metaphor deftly inscribes Pinter's inner spaces, yet elsewhere Innes tends to explain and flatten what, from another viewpoint, defies explanation and moves into a world where external reality, as in Beckett's plays, "is problematic, being filtered through imperfect senses and interpreted according to received ideas." Aside from that, lhe book's organizing principles work well, although Peter Nichols, grouped with the Brechtian realists, seems rather out of focus (no discussion of Joe Egg) and Peter Shaffer is overestimated as a poet. Edward Bond could have been placed with the comedians instead of the realists, as indeed could Shaw, but [nnes's account of Bond's career is especially convincing. Informed by a knowledge of contemporary European theatre, that essay sympathetically explores Bond's aggressive imagery while acknowledging the reductive ideology of his later work: "The politics that make his plays flawed are also what gives them such moral force that they demand to be taken seriOUSly." Inevitably, in a book of such scope, there are emphases and details one can quarrel with, but, with its masterful overview of trends and relationships, Innes's commentary is authoritative and thought-provoking. ANTHONY W. JENKINS, UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA JOHN LOUIS DIGAETANI, ed. A Companion to Pirandello Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1991. Pp. xxviii, 443· $75.00. In his acknowledgments to A Companion to Pirandello Studies, John Louis DiGaetani thanks Glauco Cambon for his encouragement during the preparation of the present volume, and remembers the time when he himself, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, used, like so many of us, Professor Cambon's anthology of essays on Pirandello. Unfortunately Glauco Cambon, a colleague and a person dear to many of Book Reviews us, did not live to see the completion of this and many other projects that he not only encouraged but inspired. Had he been with us now, he would certainly express a positive judgment on this particular publication. Nearly twenty-five years after the publication of Cambon's anthology, DiGaetani's volume comes to update the field of Pirandello studies. ]n fact this new book sets itself to be a true "companion," which will accompany the beginner in hislher discovery of the intricate Pirandellian world as well as aid the advanced student to investigate the historical coordinates of the development of critical studies on Pirandello's work and define new avenues for research. The volume is particularly directed to a North American audience and, more generally. to English-speaking readers, since. as Eric Bentley pointedly remarks in his foreword to the volume. " For the English-speaking world. Luigi Pirandello remains. in 1991, terra incognita" (xvii). The so-called "canonical critic" and main translator of Pirandello's work in English puts his finger in the wound, and denounces the fact that for too many years PirandeJlo has been considered an influential dramatist but a minor novelist. Moreover, Bentley observes that most of "Pirandello's writings are totally unknown to the English-speaking world" (xv...