Shaw the Dramatic Artist

BOOK REVIEWS short. The actual Lawrence's enchantment with machinery and unmistakable pride in mastering it belie Allen's Lawrence reluctantly "acknowledging the twentieth century here at least." Typically, Allen over-values Lawrence's proclamation that he envisioned Arabs fighting "a series of single combats" so, predictably, he invokes sword imagery; but in Seven Pillars the sword no more represents the real Lawrence than do well-coordinated military maneuvers, the machine gun he used so capably in ambushing trains, or the "air Lewis" with which he unchivalrously claimed to have armed himself. Allen's claim that Seven Pillars is a medievalist's version of the last of the old-style wars is symptomatic. Lawrence was a good soldier, fighting a twentieth-century war of movement and combined arms attacks on supply lines and nerve centers. Moreover, he mastered the arts of nationalistic wars in which hearts and minds figure more prominently than weaponry. His pragmatic, clear "Twenty-seven Articles " and the idealistic, figurative—but only figurative—meditations on the Arab revolt in Seven Pillars demonstrate commitment, knowledge, imagination, and thought more compelling and explanatory than Allen's alleged medievalism. A modern man who fought a modern war, Lawrence would have understood our wars in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf fully. His medievalism was a youthful interest, misused literary resource, and a limited inspiration. Allen fails to argue that it was anything more. Keith N. Hull ___________________ University of Wyoming Shaw the Dramatic Artist John A. Bertolini. The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. χ + 206 pp. $22.95 BERTOLINl's book is another notable contribution to the books on Shaw that began to appear in the late 1960s and include Louis Crompton's Shaw the Dramatist (1969), Margery M. Morgan's The Shavian Playground (1972), Maurice Valency's The Cart and the Trumpet : The Plays of George Bernard Shaw (1973), Charles A. Berst's Bernard Shaw and the Art of the Drama (1973), Bernard F. Dukore's Bernard Shaw, PL·ywήght: Aspects of Shavian Drama (1973), J. L. Wisenthal's The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw's Middle Plays (1974), Alfred Turco Jr.'s Shaw's Moral Vision: Self and Salvation (1976), Robert F. Whitman's Bernard Shaw and the PL·y of Ideas (1977), A. M. 347 ELT: VOLUME35:3 1992 Gibbs's The Art and Mind of Shaw (1983), and Arthur Ganz's George Bernard Shaw (1983). All these books lay stress upon Shaw the creative artist and correct most of the earlier treatments of Shaw which tended to emphasize, mostly with limited success, Shaw the thinker, the controversialist , and the didactic writer. It is true that some of the critics cited above, notably Valency, Turco, and Whitman, have been concerned with Shaw's ideas, his intellectual origins, and his backgrounds, but these critics amplify rather than divert attention from Shaw's artistry. Bertolini in some sense pushes such preoccupation with Shaw as creative artist even further, to a primary concern with Shaw as a playwright who is especially conscientious as to the effects he produces in his plays and who allegedly reveals in them certain aspects of his personal life and his career as writer for the theatre. Bertolini in his study provides sensitive, acute, and perceptive readings of the plays that he discusses. If his interpretations do not always generate agreement, they ensure much stimulus for the student of Shaw. In these readings of selected plays, Bertolini remains alert to their symbolic, mythical, and allegorical properties and to the psychic ramifications of Shaw's characters. If anything, the study suffers to an extent from its excellence . In certain of his interpretations Bertolini becomes, in my view, not only subtle but oversubtle, sometimes making judgments based upon slender evidence. In particular the allegorical premises that inform some of his judgments remain strained, tenuous, or inconclusive. Bertolini regards the plays as having a primary relevance to Shaw as evolving artist. He sees them as reflecting the alleged challenges, difficulties, and struggles that Shaw experienced as a writer for the theatre. According to Bertolini, they project also Shaw's obsessive sense of rivalry with Shakespeare (I regard this rivalry as less intense than does...