Everyman and Company ed. by Donald Gilman (review)

Reviews367 Beckett canon? One thing, at least, is already clear: the recent appearance of books so divergent in their critical and historical accounts of Samuel Beckett suggests the critical benefits to be gained from the interpretive play of repetition and difference. STANTON B. GARNER, JR. University of Tennessee, Knoxville Donald Gilman, ed. Everyman and Company. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Pp. iv + 351. $42.50. The subsidiary title of this collection is Essays on the Theme and Structure of the European Moral Play, a subheading which makes the implicit assumption that there was such a phenomenon as a Europe-wide genre of the moral play. It becomes apparent very quickly that this is rather a problematic assumption, recognized perhaps in the fact that the collection begins with a long keynote essay which deals expressly with the matter of genre and its definition. This is a piece by Merle Fifield on the application of genre theory to the moral plays. In a finely argued presentation, she suggests a shift of emphasis in the study of the moral play away from the general and the generic to the particular and the comparative and argues for an inductive application of genre theory which classifies plays on a selected list according to their rhetorical similarities, with as many paradigms being established "as is necessary to accommodate the contrasts among categories of analagous texts." The method has the advantage that each text is analyzed independently from all other texts and "contributes equally to every generic description as a member of a generic or an open paradigm and as a contrast to all other paradigms." This method can easily accommodate the Continental practice of classifying dramatic literatures first by authorial intention or theme, since subsequent phases of the method are able to satisfy more formalist approaches. Having admirably elaborated a method of application of genre theory which enables a comparative study across different national literary and dramatic traditions and thereby justifying the raison d'être of the book, Fifield thereafter, examining three motifs in the English moral play, makes reference to their occurrence in certain French and Dutch plays too: the Dance of Death, the macrocosmic trial, and the life of the profligate. One problem, however, in this second part of her discussion is that she becomes rather too caught up in the question of tragic and comic mode, which does not really ring true as the best way into a comparative approach to this drama and probably imposes upon it too great a stress of Renaissance theoretical categories. One might question, for instance, whether a distinction between the ultimate salvation or damnation of a central protagonist necessarily introduces different dramatic modes in this body of early drama in quite the way in which the nature of narrative closure is an integral part of far more distinguishable comic and tragic genres of later drama. For all this, Fifield's essay is a weighty piece, rich in ideas and likely to be seminal. The remaining six essays in the collection are all less theoretical, and each focuses on a different country, covering in turn France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. Each deals with an aspect of that 368Comparative Drama drama which might be considered to fall into the category of the "moral play" though the interpretation of what constitutes this is very wide indeed. Each essay contains a fairly detailed discussion of one or two plays that form the focal point, which usefully allows the reader an insight through example into dramatic traditions of which she or he may have little or no knowledge. Alan Knight's essay on the French morality play considers the development of the hero, from early plays with contrasting protagonists whose behavior was either to be emulated or utterly eschewed—e.g., those found in Bien Avisé et Mal Avisé or L'Homme Juste et L'Homme Mondain—to plays in which the comportment of the protagonist becomes the central problem and the concept of the will is represented with more complexity. Of all the drama discussed in this collection, these French plays are probably recognizably the closest to the English concept of the morality play. In what is the...