Aeschylus by John Herington (review)

Reviews297 He discusses very interestingly two principal ways in which the forms of this drama survived. The first is the adaptation of the modes of the saint play to polemical drama in the course of the sixteenth century, specifically in Bale's King Johan. The second is the adjustment of hagiographical material itself to the demands of the Protestant creed, such as the rejection of iconographie and sacramental elements in favor of the Word and the exclusion of legendary material and non-scriptural saints; and in these respects he considers Wager's The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene. This article is neatiy complemented by the last essay, John Wasson's account of die secular saint plays of the Elizabethan era, in which he argues that the saint drama tradition was transmitted tiirough education and considers works such as Godly Queene Hester, Godly Susannah, and even some Shakespearean and post-Shakespearean plays in the light of this. The result is a cogent argument for the survival of a dramatic tradition long thought to have ended with the coming of the Reformation. Possibly the most important achievement of this collection, aside from attempting to establish the parameters of the saint play as a type and offering a stimulating and multifaceted discussion of the genre, is its placing of the tradition within significant contexts both dramatic and non-dramatic. The advantage of assembling a group of specialists with diverse interests to put together a "survey" of this type is that the perspectives brought to bear yield far more interesting results than might otherwise have been the case. There are some drawbacks, however. Although there are a few earlier attempts to define the genre, it is left to the final essay to make a comprehensive distinction between the three types of saint play. It is also surprising in view of the paucity of extant British examples that there is no full discussion of the Cornish St. Meriasek and, given that the accepted definitions make its inclusion possible, there is none either of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Nonetheless, it is to the credit of die editor and the contributors that each has taken the others' contributions into account as much as they have done and that the result is as coherent within its diversity as this book is. It fills a much needed gap and is likely to be regarded as a standard work of early drama scholarship. DARRYLL GRANTLEY The University of Kent at Canterbury John Herington. Aeschylus. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 191. $25.00 (cloth); $7.95 (paper). With Aeschylus, John Herington gives us the third volume of a new series, "Hermes Books," of which he is general editor. The purpose of the series is to present classical authors "to the literate but nonspecialist adult or to that equally important person, tiie intelligent but uninstructed beginning student" (p. vii). Herington wishes to recapture the kind of relation between specialist and general reader that was represented, for example, by Gilbert Murray's popular studies nearly a century ago. But the audience, or rather market, for such works today has changed: it is 298Comparative Drama not a class characterized and in part defined by the shared sense of a literary tradition, but rather undergraduates enrolled in required courses designed to make them sensitive to the rumbles of a by now distant canon. In this context, the teacher necessarily becomes a sort of advocate or pleader, and there is a temptation to simplify and exalt one's subject, to make it immediate or relevant. Now and then, Herington succumbs. Aeschylus' sense of the wholeness of the cosmos is something we are "beginning to relearn, from the écologiste" (p. 2) ; an offense against Earth, Sky, Ocean, and Sun "may attract a terrible vengeance ... as the industrialized nations are painfully rediscovering in the twentieth century" (p. 7); geneticists are invoked to explain the Greek idea of a family curse (p. 9), and Athens is compared to a "so-called developing nation in our own era" (p. 27), an analogy that is not, in my view, accurate. The intention behind such references is apparent, yet they come near to condescension...