The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, and: Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams (review)

Two recent volumes of essays, Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams and The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, attest to ongoing interest in both the dramatic works and the biography of one of America's most significant playwrights. Building in part on new productions and the publication of previously inaccessible texts and letters in the past few years, the collections attempt to add to the available body of knowledge, provide new interpretations of individual plays, and offer a reassessment of Williams's work, especially the late dramas.

The twelve essays collected by Ralph F. Voss in Magical Muse were originally developed as presentations at the Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature. As might be expected, the scholars who gathered to discuss Tennessee Williams at the symposium all brought their own diverse topics and approaches, resulting in a book with no particular unifying focus. In the introduction Voss explains that he has grouped the pieces "roughly according to bibliographical and biographical, critical and theoretical, and, finally, broadly cultural considerations" (3). Though the arrangement is probably as logical as any for the disparate contributions, anyone reading cover to cover will still find some slightly odd juxtapositions. For example, Jackson R. Bryer's discussion of Williams's use of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald as characters in Clothes for a Summer Hotel and of parallels between A Streetcar named Desire and The Great Gatsby is followed by Barbara M. Harris's essay examining the extent of Williams's mark on popular culture. Harris's entertaining catalogue of allusions to Williams's plays, character names, and lines of dialogue in television shows, such as The Golden Girls and Frasier, will not necessarily interest the reader seeking additional analysis of individual plays. Likewise, Robert Siegel's examination of the mind/body duality in several of Williams's major works seems targeted to a slightly different audience from that for W. Kenneth Holditch's personal recollection of an encounter with Williams, combined with accounts of the playwright's various New Orleans residences and some of his favorite restaurants and bars in the city he considered his home. (Unfortunately, the photographic images that apparently accompanied Holditch's presentation at the symposium are not reproduced in the book.)

Given the range of material included, it is likely that many readers of this book will be picking it up at a library in order to peruse a single chapter on a topic of interest. However, others may choose to dip into more of this book, accessible to anyone with a familiarity with Williams's major works and the highlights of his biography, to expand their knowledge and to keep up with new developments in Williams scholarship. Indeed, the first essay in the collection is an overview by George W. Crandell of scholarly work on Williams, especially since the death in 1994 of Maria St. Just, the obstructionist cotrustee of the Rose Williams estate. The coeditor of the 2000 publication of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Albert J. Devlin, offers an examination of the formative year 1939 and the influence of two little-known artistic role models for Williams. Coeditor of the letters with Devlin, Nancy M. Tischler here considers the impact of the motion picture code on the screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Michael Paller explores the image of Williams's sister Rose in several plays, while Jeffrey B. Loomis compares several different versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, sensing a Pirandellian effort of certain individual characters to dominate the play.

Other essays in Magical Muse include Allean Hale's reappraisal of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, a work which has generally been viewed as a failure. Consideration of the play as a noh drama...