Lawrence as Playwright

ELT 44 : 1 2001 when "Jewishness" is examined through representations of the racialized cultural discourse of the last two centuries, one discovers that Gentiles and Jews alike more often than not arrived at a disturbing ambivalence toward both the symbol and identity. In light of this, he suggests we embrace the postmodern, liberating endeavor through which this Jewishness, as a prime historical example of an indeterminate, multivalent , and yet constraining cultural symbol, can serve to inform and educate; while this is an admirable goal, Freedman's hopes for the inclusion of "the Jew" in present ethnic or Cultural studies also appears to assume a Jewishness drawn from the tenets of Judaism itself to be either ossified or perhaps just irrelevant to postmodern man. While I congratulate him on his work in The Temple of Culture and join him in advocating for the study of "the Jew" as a postmodern/postcolonial discipline, I reserve the hope that future studies of this kind also come to recognize how a Judaic-based Jewishness also played a key role in the story of "the Jew," anti-Semitism, and assimilation-by-culture. Neil R. Davison _____________ Oregon State University Lawrence as Playwright D. H. Lawrence. The Plays. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. cxxvi + 824 pp. $175.00 D. H. LAWRENCE'S reputation as a writer, to state the obvious, has never rested on his dramatic works; rather, critical notice of them has waxed and waned over the years. Some pieces were published (and performed) during his lifetime, only to be forgotten almost instantly. The 1960s and 70s saw a moderate surge of interest with several stage, television and radio productions. In 1965 an edition of the complete plays, lacking any critical apparatus, was published in London by Heinemann. More recently, Lawrence the dramatist has found recognition in such standard reference sources as The Oxford Companion to the Theatre (after being omitted from the first three editions), and The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre. Indeed, Ronald Hayman claims (in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama) that Lawrence's plays "now seem superior to those of Shaw, Galsworthy, and GranvilleBarker ," while his "realistic reproduction of dialect dialogue ... distills something very close to poetry." Whether the publication of the complete plays (as part of the monumental Cambridge edition) will do anything to sustain Hayman's judgement or to increase general awareness of the 122 BOOK REVIEWS plays remains to be seen; however, serious scholars of Lawrence's work have little to fault in this handsome and meticulous edition. Editors Schwarze and Worthen appear to have been allowed carte blanche in preparing this edition of more than 950 pages, which also comes with a hefty price tag. The actual texts of the eight completed plays comprise just over half the number of pages; the remainder (a very generous 425 pages) is devoted to a full scholarly and critical apparatus. The editors' introduction, which focuses on the "writing, publication, performance and reception" of the plays according to various periods, is a lengthy monograph in itself. The information it contains fairly exhausts what is to be known factually about the plays; the editors have been thorough in their historical research. The only slight weakness is their apparent reluctance to offer much of their own critical analysis; the plays and their history are held out for the reader at an objective arm's length. However, this approach is more welcome than some of the strains of crackpot theorizing that could have been expended on these works (this is Lawrence after all). The introduction is supplemented by a very useful chronology, more than ninety pages of explanatory notes to the plays, a glossary of dialect and slang, and 110 pages of textual variants that fall largely into the jot and tittle category. If anything, all these features amount to scholarly overload. For example , some of the contextual biographical information supplied in the introduction is repeated in the explanatory notes (although, of course, there might well be those people who would read one and not the other). Nevertheless, the notes are excellent on geographical background, biographical identification of characters, parallels with Lawrence's other works, and...