What Shaw Really Said by Ruth Adam, and: Bernard Shaw and the Theater in the Nineties: A Study of Shaw's Dramatic Criticism by Harold Fromm, and: The Wit and Satire of Bernard Shaw by Fred Mayne (review)

1968 BOOK REVIEWS 341 have been unforgettably brilliant, and would have vastly benefitted. both the theater and the dramatist. Like all great theaters, the Gate has been a superb training ground for actors, and among its alumni are James Mason. Orson Welles, Cyril Cusack, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Peggy Cummins. Yet the tragedy of the Gate is that its finest work Jives only in the memory or in the pages of MacLiamm6ir's book. Edwards and MacLiamm6ir have grown old, and their knowledge and artistry will to a large extent die with them, for they were never subsidized by the government and no longer even maintain a standing company. Still, even at this late date something might be salvaged if both of them were brought into the Abbey Theater. The next best thing would be an American edition of Hilton Edward's book The Mantle of Harlequin. ROBERT HOGAN University of California, Davis WHAT SHAW REALLY SAID, by Ruth Adam, Schocken Books, New York, 1967, 176 pp. Price $4.00. BERNARD SHAW AND THE THEATER IN THE NINETIES: A STUDY OF SHAW'S DRAMATIC CRITICISM, by Harold Fromm, The University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1967. 234 pp. Price $5.00. THE WIT AND SA TIRE OF BERNARD SHAW, by Fred Mayne, St. Martin's Press. New York, 1967. 154 pp. Price $6.95. Ruth Adam's What Shaw Really Said represents an attempt by a teacher, novelist, and journalist rather than a scholar to summarize Shaw's views. Those ideas which Shaw dramatized and which have effortlessly become a part of our culture attain little lustre from Mrs. Adam's treatment. Sometimes she adduces an arresting quotation, but she only documents her work when she does not need to (when she cites the plays). When she uses an unusual passage, she seldom informs us of her source. She adds nothing interesting on such well-worn subjects as Shaw on sex, religion, medicine, the English, the theater, and children. She is best on subjects that Shaw mostly covered in his prose, e.g., democracy. war, and crime and punishment. In these categories her summaries are useful and discerning . In "About Crime and Punishment" her service is genuine, as she carefully elucidates, on the one side, Shaw's abhorrence of cruelty and his detestation of punishment and. on the other side. his careless authoritarianism and his approval of extermination for the socially unfit. The occasional insight and the measured approach alleviate matters, but by and large Mrs. Adam's book is superficial. The standard book on Shaw's mind is still William Irvine's The Universe of G. B. S. Mrs. Adam's work is far from achieving a place beside it. Her book is pedestrian. Harold Fromm's Bernard Shaw and the Theater in the Nineties is also superficial and pedestrian. His book is useful as it organizes the contents of Our Theatres in the Nineties and some of Shaw's other work (principally the uncollected essays gathered into E. J. West's Shaw on Theatre, Pen Portraits and Reviews, and Prefaces by Bernard Shaw). Mr. Fromm mostly sticks with the critiques written for the Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898 and collected in Our Theatres in the Nineties. Shaw's theater pieces comprise some of the best occasional journalism ever written, and we welcome exposure to them once again. Fromm analyzes them topically. under such rubrics as "Ethics. Esthetics, and Metaphysics," "Nineteenth-Century Drama" (Shaw versus "the well-made play" 342 MODERN DRAMA December and Shaw versus Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones), "Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama," "Ibsen," "The Censorship," "Actors and Acting," and "The Theater." The discussions vary in quality and fullness. Fromm is good on the well-made play. perfunctory on the theater, and covers familiar ground without new insight in presenting Shaw on Shakespeare and Ibsen. Fromm's book tends to be a summary of Shaw's critical essays (some of his discussions rely on the summary of one or two leading essays) rather than an exercise in speculative analysis. Mr. .Fromm is content to be safe and uninspired. There are serious deficiencies, I think, in Mr. Fromm's book. His neglect of the origins of Shaw's critical...