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BOOK REVIEWS conviction of the truth of it all has grown," Yeats continued to Shakespear. And that leaves still open the question of what A Vision is. While Adams has taken us a long way toward recognizing and naming the characteristics of A Vision, its full nature remains unclear, its genre still unnamed. I suspect that if there is a category within which A Vision can stretch and range to its full extent, it is not among those we literary critics already know, but among the products, some "literary," some not, of other occult experiments—among strange texts in territory forbidding to us but familiar to Yeats. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux University of Maryland, College Park Shaw & Lady Gregory Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record. Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene, eds. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993. xlii + 211pp. $29.95 THE CORRESPONDENCE and record Laurence and Grene furnish us deal with the business relationships of Shaw and Lady Gregory, Shaw's professional advice to her, her solicitations of his plays for performance at the Abbey Theatre, and the many details of their eventual production. Equally important, the book chronicles the personal friendship of two extraordinary dramatists and public figures, a friendship that grew over the course of nearly thirty-five years. Shaw himself could have been writing of this personal dimension of the relationship and of the present volume when, in response to Lady Gregory's wondering whether to take her memoir of Hugh Lane away from the publisher Grant Richards, he advised her to do so, adding that "The book not only has a chance of being written, but of being a work of art instead of a collection of memoranda." Indeed, far from amounting to a collection of memoranda, this book recommends itself as an artful rendering of two artists' lives, "consort battleships" in Shavian terms, as those lives intersected each other and the lives of other artists, actors, politicians, and men and women of letters. Having a book on Shaw and the Abbey Theatre seems puzzling. At first glance such a relationship seems, at best, tangential. Yeats, one of the great moving spirits behind the Abbey, and before it the Irish Literary Theatre and the Irish National Theatre Society, was as fundamentally opposite to Shaw as any evangelist of aesthetic and of nationalistic creeds would be to an Ibsenite of Shaw's politics. Neither would, on his own, likely have anything to do with the other. Given the 345 ELT 40:3 1997 "complete lack of sympathy" between them which the editors point out, "it seems clear that without the relationship with Lady Gregory, Shaw would never have become involved with the Abbey Theatre to the extent that he did." Even so, Shaw's involvement with the Abbey was minimal; yet the involvement was there in undeniable ways. Hence, one of the book's premises: "If for Shaw the Abbey represented 'the path not taken,' then his awareness of that path, the play of attitudes and emotions surrounding his decision not to take it, can illuminate both the playwright and the theatre movement that he did not choose to join." Turning to those whose lives form part of the background of the dual portraits of GBS and Lady Gregory, one finds such familiar figures as Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell and, among other less familiar personalities, Sarah Allgood, Annie Horniman, and J. Augustus Keogh who are the subjects of biographical notes. These "brief lives" along with often lengthy prefatory notes to the individual letters and journal entries serve to fill out the varied backgrounds against which we see the principal players. Unfortunately, some of the notes on the events in the lives of these figures are far too brief, a regrettable but perhaps necessary element of the work. In treating Shaw's and Lady Gregory's relationship during the Great War, for example, the editors present the significantly relevant business of Shaw's O'Flakerty, VC. (never performed at the Abbey Theatre during the War) and Shaw's positive stance on recruiting for the War in Ireland, including his pamphlet, War Issues for Irishmen, which was rendered obsolete by the...

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