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82Comparative Drama abbess, a situation quite different from that of the Fleury composer and the seculars Vidal and Ventadorn. Another remarkable feature of the Virtutum is the liveliness of this morality play, with a host of allegorical figures as in Everyman and The Castle of Perseverance. The musical element of Hildegard's allegorical piece lifts it onto a gracious and emotional level of dramatic experience. Without such elevation this kind of drama tends to die didactically on the vine. The production of this edition of the Virtutum by the Society for Old Music under the Davidsons' direction at Kalamazoo in May 1984 demonstrated how dynamic the work is, and even from the printed edition the reader will sense that this is more than an oratorio, that it shares a dramatic power and poignancy with the great church music-dramas of the period. In another sense it is an early harbinger of the Renaissance masque: of The Tempest and Ben Jonson and the Milton-Lawes Comus. Experience with the other medieval plays indicates that the first modern productions use the Latin words, and those who are Latinists disdain the notion of translation and performance in English. Later productions, however, seeking more audiences, begin to experiment with English. Without diminishing our gratitude for the present edition, we hope that Audrey Davidson will find a collaborative poet—Janet Lembke or equal— who can recreate Hildegard's words in singable English. The edition might then be offered bilingually, for a choice of enjoyments. FLETCHER COLLINS, JR. Mary Baldwin College Directions in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed Peter Burian. Durham, N. C: Duke University Press, 1985. Pp. viii + 236. $27.50. Six of the best critics of Greek drama writing in English today are represented in this volume, which emerged from a conference held in 1977. Five of the essays are close readings of individual plays: Hippolytus , Hecuba, Suppliant Women, Bacchae, and the enigmatic Rhesus, which is defended here as the earliest surviving work of Euripides. A sixth essay, on Euripides as a prophetic poet, serves as an introduction to the collection. A select bibliography of post-war criticism on all Euripides ' plays concludes the book. As a group the essays hang together somewhat loosely, but they share a critical sensibility that confers a certain unity on the collection (Kenneth Reckford wittily lists some of the assumptions common to what he calls a "gathering of sophists," p. 113). All (or almost all) the contributors have the new criticism as a heritage, which, whatever their thematic, structuralist, or post-structuralist concerns, continues to ground the several essays in the poetic word or image. Bernard Knox launches the collection with a brief sketch of Euripides as a kind of Rimbaud avant la lettre, who "begins the tradition of the poet not only as a prophet but also as outcast and rejected" (p. 4). It is poetry for a city on the verge of dissolution, not quite conscious of the impending doom: "Euripidean tragedy is the writing on the Athenian Reviews83 wall," writes Knox (p. 6), and I think of the long walls leading to the harbor that the Spartans ordered destroyed after their victory in the Peloponnesian Wars. Knox's Euripides is the first European intellectual, bookish and alienated, which explains his interest in out-of-the-way legends with spicy action and drastic reversals. But these were also "images of a new Greek world in the making" (p. 11), one that had "reached the end of its spiritual reserves" (p. 12). It is still hard not to think of the Greek city-state as the bright childhood of the human race, and Knox gives us a Euripides who peers into the coming darkness. Anne Pippin Burnett addresses the vexed problem of the Rhesus, a play full of lively action, but constantly undercut by bathos and absurdity : "the fact is that these dubious moments are so egregious that they cannot have been mere careless errors overlooked by the dramatist" (p. 14). On this crucial premise Burnett exposes the anomalies in the play as travesty: the lack of a central character as the focus of the action, Athena's ridiculous imitation of Venus, the portrait of...

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