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380Comparative Drama relating to his chosen dramatists and patrons and, similarly,he is always alert to the purely practical benefits to be reaped by ambitious authors and stationers from the patronage networks of the late Elizabethan and Stuart court and metropolis . But this book is perhaps at its best in exploring the more abstract concepts ofearly modern literary patronage, including issues ofthe growing social status ofdramatic endeavour and the sheer diversity ofthe various concepts of authorship held not only by writers but also by their readers and patrons. This book offers a major new addition to our knowledge of the possible definitions of literary patronage and will undoubtedly serve to stimulate further research into the various topics raised. Michael G. Brennan University ofLeeds Brenda Murphy. The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 282. $85.00 cloth. Brenda Murphy begins her exploration of the Provincetown Players and the culture ofmodernitywith theunqualified assertion that"the Provincetown Players was the most significant and the most influential American theatre group ofthe early twentieth century" (xiii). Generously acknowledging earlier studies that have provided groundwork for this contention, Murphy then articulates her unique focus on the groups"wider significance in twentieth-centuryAmerican culture,"specifically, the significant links between Provincetown artists and the development of American modernism in the arts (xiv). Her carefully researched , compelling investigation ofthis phenomenon not only illuminates and expands previous scholarship but undoubtedlypaves the way for further investigation ofthe works andprocesses examined.Murphybrings to the project,which combines cultural history and dramatic criticism, a thorough understanding of her subject, keen critical insight, and lucid expression. Her identification of Provincetown as a"movement" (xv) is a telling choice that echoes Provincetown business manager Eleanor Fitzgerald's insistence on a Provincetown"idea"that transcends organizational, chronological, or spatial boundaries. Accordingly, Murphydevotes considerable attention to works that were, strictlyspeaking,produced by other organizations (the Other Players and the Experimental Theatre, Inc.).That theseworks are,however,best understood as part ofthe Provincetown "movement"and aresignificantlylinked to theparentorganization,is eloquently demonstrated in this study. Reviews381 Murphy's analysis unfolds in five chapters of nearly equal length. In her first chapter,"The Founding: Myth and History? she is obliged to retrace some familiar territory in summarizing the group's legendary creation in the summer of 1915 and its general organizational history. Murphy does not dwell on these matters, however, moving swiftly to her greater interest in the intellectual and ideological currents ofAmerican modernism and their aesthetic manifestation within the Provincetown repertory. Murphy's list of philosophical and ideological influences includes William James, John Dewey, Freud, Nietzsche, Monism, anarchism, and feminism. Within this overview, her consideration of James and Dewey, minimally treated in previous accounts, and her thorough discussion ofNietzsche's wide-ranging influence, are particularlywelcome. This chapter also includes a brief overview of burgeoning aesthetic innovations, including the realist/naturalist dramaturgy of Ibsen, Strindberg, and others, the gritty realism of the Ashcan School of Art, and the nonrealistic "postimpressionism " that supplanted the Ashcan School as the visual avant-garde. In setting up an aesthetic framework within which to analyze Provincetown's repertory, Murphy challenges Gerhard Bach's influential 1978 categorization of "three phrases ofdramatic development—an initial phase ofsocial realism,leading to the phase ofrealism versus symbolism—leading again into the last phase ofrenewed social realism interspersed with experiments in expressionism"(40). Following and further developing an argument begun by Glaspell biographer Barbara Ozieblo, Murphy offers a persuasive alternate view: a repertory characterized by tensions between realist and nonrealist art "present from the very beginning of the Players" (41), and continuing throughout its history. In her second chapter Murphy analyses the thirteen plays comprising the Players' first two summer seasons (1915-16). Here Murphy reminds us that the Provincetown's founding membership was virtuallya"Who'sWho"ofNewYork's Little Renaissance (16), including post-impressionist artists Charles Demuth, Marsdon Hartley, Bror Nordfeldt, and William and Marguerite Zorach; radical labor journalists Jack Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse; Max Eastman, editor of the magazine Masses, and his wife, feminist activist Ida Rauh; fiction writer Susan Glaspell and her husband, classicist/socialist/Nietzschean Jig Cook; New Stagecraft pioneer Robert Edmond Jones, and the budding playwright...

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