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98Comparative Drama tion to the library of everyone interested in O'Neill. The details of production provide fascinating reading; they offer valuable insights to O'Neill's dramatic art and to the creativity of those practical men of the theater who had to meet O'Neill's challenges. Wainscott gives us an added appreciation for those directors and designers and actors who made it possible for so original and experimental an artist as O'Neill to put his plays on the boards. If I were forced to say something negative about this fine piece of theater research, it is that I would have wanted many more photographs of the first performances as well as an even wider sampling of the comments by reviewers—these in order to get even closer to catching the stage moment exactly as it happened. But here the economics connected with publishing come into play. Wainscott should be congratulated for writing a valuable and insight-filled book of research scholarship on an exciting time in American theater history. NORMAND BERLIN University of Massachusetts, Amherst Kenneth J. Reckford. Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy, Volume I: Six Essays in Perspective. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Pp. xiv + 567. $35.00. I cannot remember the last time I had such mixed feelings about a work of criticism. Reckford's volume (which he plans to follow with a separate work on The Clouds) is variously discouraging, illuminating, frustrating, brilliant, and simplistic. It is hardly a single work; it not only deals with numerous topics, but is written in different styles and, worse, addressed to different levels of intelligence and in different modes of discourse . When he sticks to Aristophanes, we are generally on pretty solid ground. Unfortunately, Reckford insists on not sticking to Aristophanes, but roams freely and sometimes randomly through the entire cosmos of the worlds of drama, literature, ideas, psychology, and philosophy. Reckford also likes to comment upon or refer to authors who happen to be his personal favorites no matter how inappropriate this is. In the same sentence, with equal emphasis, he cites James Joyce and G. K. Chesterton. The effect of this is to make a potentially major work seem inchoate or confused. A further stylistic stumbling block is the fact that Reckford does not seem to know who his audience is. Refreshingly, he does not pedantically insist on citing from the original Greek, but uses anglicized spelling and provides his own (sometimes very good) translations. There is little of the rarified esoterity that marks much classical scholarship and criticism. I like the fact that he makes attempts to reach the intelligent non-Greek reader, of which there are unfortunately an ever growing number. Yet much of his material on Aristophanes is of a quite specialized nature; I am not objecting to this—these are the best parts of the book. There is no doubt that he knows his field, when his field is Aristophanes. Reckford has a formidable grasp of Aristophanes, not only critically and intellectually , but intuitively. He is one of the few people who have a real under- Reviews99 standing of and sensitivity to the full spectrum of Aristophanes' genius; he does not oversimplify Aristophanes. Unfortunately, he simplifies almost everyone else. For example, a passing reference to Aristophanic elements in Shakespeare's comedy is both interesting and thought-provoking, until his three-page cliff-note "survey" of Shakespearean comedy. Likewise, his explanation of Freud becomes little more than unintended parody of Freud. Unfortunately, when Reckford cites a major author, too often he feels he must give a capsulized summary of the author's work. Here Reckford betrays a penchant not only for saying the obvious, but also for pounding it to death with the sledgehammer of oversimplification. It is incomprehensible that anyone who even browses through this tome will not be at least somewhat familiar with Freud, Shakespeare, Plato, and other major thinkers or writers. When Reckford discards the academic mantle and speaks personally (as for example in analyzing some of his own dreams) it is both more interesting and uninsulting to the reader; it also provides much more genuine insight into the relationship between the comic process...

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