Federico Garcia Lorca by Felicia Hardison Londré (review)

182Comparative Drama their wives and children as well as on the importance of the sexual instinct (De Officiis, I: iv, xvii). Furthermore, Cicero's letters to his family show genuine affection; an example is Ad Familiares, xiv.iv, in which he begs his wife to join him in Brundisium. Clearly, while a Roman put a different value on romantic relationships from a Renaissance man, Roman attitudes were not consistent; indeed, an individual writer might be inconsistent on the subject, as Cicero is. Yet one cannot dismiss Maus's study of Jonson's classicism. Despite its problems, it offers an antidote to that comfortable view of Jonson as a "learned plagiary," a pedantic classicist whose love of Rome stifled his native genius. Furthermore, even readers who disagree with Maus will find some of her ideas fascinating. She writes well about Jonson's methods of characterization and what his contemporaries thought of them, his use and rejection of self-irony, and his shift to romantic and erotic materials. One cannot agree with all that Maus suggests, but one will certainly profit from her book. FRANCES TEAGUE University of Georgia Felicia Hardison Londré. Federico Garcia Lorca. New York: Ungar, 1984. $13.50. Early on in her general overview of Federico García Lorca's life and work for the Ungar Literature and Life series (formerly Ungar World Dramatists), Felicia Hardison Londré remarks on the Spaniard's "multivalent artistry," which reveals the "sensibilities of a musician and painter as well as of a poet." Lorca's diverse achievements in his brief life are indeed remarkable. He wrote poetry of surreal lyricism and poetry inspired by ancient Gypsy ballads and traditional Andalusian "deep song." His plays comprised naughty farce and stark poetic tragedy, were performed in established playhouses, by the strolling players of La Barraca, by puppets; and some pieces, only published forty years after his death, are dramas so dependent on abstract symbolism and continuous transformations that they aren't even considered performable at all. He composed music, sketched, painted, designed sets, and created film scripts. His art and personality made their mark in Europe, North America, and South America during his lifetime and gained lasting fame after his tragic execution by the Spanish fascists in 1936. Londré's appreciation of this diversity and her desire to introduce it all to the reader unfamiliar with Lorca's career is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the volume. Unlike works concentrating on one aspect or the other of the artist's achievement, this book touches on everything. For the reader wishing to know about both The Butterfly's Evil Spell and Poet in New York, a quick look at the index will guide him to a summary of both works' contents and biographical context, an interpretation of selected images, and citations of one or two previous critical explorations of note. Readers of Comparative Drama will find especially useful the treatment of "Theatre as Synthesis" in the final chapter on Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Reviews183 Alba. Londré also has a knack for summing up distinctive traits of Lorca's art succinctly, as when she notes that "the characteristic features of his poetry—startling metaphors, narrative understatement, and apparent simplicity of means—are echoed in the content and style of what he called his 'drawn poems' or 'poems in line'." Of course, the breadth of coverage demanded both by Lorca's versatility and the format of this series does not leave room for much depth. Federico García Lorca remains more an extended encyclopedia entry than a major contribution to Lorca scholarship. One cannot condemn Londré for writing the kind of book she was commissioned to write, but even within the constraints of the Ungar format, she might have managed a little more concern for the coherence of the book as a whole. By choosing to treat Lorca's work according to genre and by arranging the genre chapters in no particular order, Londré gives herself unnecessary difficulties in demonstrating one of her major points: that Lorca developed and changed as an artist over the years, and that works in different genres created at the same time illuminate each other...