Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage by Paul Hernadi (review)

Reviews285 play in Volume I, King Johan, is generally available. One must either buy both volumes or lose the introductions to the four plays in Volume II. Despite Glynne Wickham's eloquent appeal for John Bale's plays as transitions between moralities and Elizabethan professional drama, and despite Happé's convincing argument that Bale was not only familiar with professional drama but may even have been for a time a member of Lord Cromwell's acting company, John Bale is likely to remain of more interest to historians of the Reformation than to students of English drama. And rightly so: Bale was surely more interested in using drama for polemical purposes than in developing better drama. He was no "Wakefield Master," and he was certainly no early Shakespeare. But he deserves a hearing. JOHN WASSON Washington State University Paul Hernadi. Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Pp. 236. $22.50. The organization of this collection of often brilliant essays is puzzling. Each of the six discrete chapters takes up two historical plays in modern repertory: Saint Joan, The Lark, Murder in the Cathedral, Romulous the Great, The Devil and the Good Lord, The Great Wall of China, The Book of Christopher Columbus, The Life of Galileo, The Skin of Our Teeth, Marat/ Sade, Caligula, and Amadeus. The first three cohere beautifully both in theme and rhetoric. There is a disconcerting lapse in expository style in Chapter IV, and, although Chapters V and VI return to clear syntax, they do not return to the thematics of the first three chapters (except by an almost flippant mention of the poles of Action and Vision in the very last sentence). There is neither introduction nor conclusion, although the brief opening chapter on Shaw and Anouilh introduces the collection. If we may make an inference from the acknowledgements section, the first half of this collection is the book Hernadi meant to write; the second half, versions of presentations which worked out well in his NEH Summer Seminars. This means that students of drama will find here a wealth of insights on twelve plays, usually couched with wit and folksy references to American politics and parenthood. It means also that such students will find far less discussion of tragicomedy—and history plays as a subgenre of tragicomedy—than the title and page total would lead them to expect. Perhaps the optimal frame of mind for readers here is to imagine themselves in a seminar being led by Hernadi. He does not force a Derridean collaboration in which texture (i.e., suface word play and pseudo-etymology) is as important as tenor. Rather he presents data (plots, quotations, schemata), and after the first three chapters makes synthesizing the reader's (optional) responsibility. Basically, these plays exemplify a bi-directional fascination in history such as historical novelist Ricarda Huch cited as underlying her own oeuvre: we study the past to understand the aresent and the ^resent to 286Comparative Drama understand the past. In drama, Hernadi reminds us, action is usually directly presented in a framework suggesting an interpretive vision. History plays, especially the ones he is studying, have an additional bi-directional appeal, first, of re-presenting real events veraciously and judgmentally; second, of having a métonymie relationship to the present. This appeal of the re-presented, analogical true story is so pleasurable that Hernadi terms it "erotic." Since life is mixed, it is no wonder that tragicomedy, however identified, is an appropriate generic label for history plays. Hernadi tends toward an encyclopedic résumé of pertinent theater history and recent criticism, and—making only minor terminological modifications of his own (another trait of the conscientious seminar teacher)—he proposes two useful binary oppositions: admiration and indignation, fulfillment and frustration. These nouns are indicators (he says "thrusts") of effects intended by the playwright and/or responses elicited from the spectator—in varying and mixed proportions. Certainly the plays he chooses have mixed effects and correspondingly elicit mixed responses. Further, in several instances there have been so many recorded authorial changes, as he carefully notes, that we can only assume the playwright himself (there are only male...