The Bowers Beaumont and Fletcher

A RUSSIAN EXISTENTIALIST 105 The God to whom Shestov turns is the creator God of Genesis, and not the commander-demander God of Exodus and the later books. Faith in God is, according to Shestov, not passive belief or trust, but the courage which lifts us out of despair into action precisely when our most familiar guiding principles have been shattered. In Athens and Jerusalem Shestov reviews the entire history of philosophy -characteristically, omitting British philosophy. His lengthy review is intended to show that, with a few exceptions, the philosophic progeny of Athens seeks to persuade us that what we 7tnow makes nonsense of our most vital questions, hopes, fears, and loves. However important to us they may be, they must therefore be destroyed. Shestov interprets the great story of Genesis as saying that the only thing that can destroy Adam's freedom is his own belief that knowing what is true can limit or coniine him. Since Adam, countless men have loved and died, and we understand a great deal about the psychological and biological circumstances of love and death. But none of this can touch or help the lonely approach of each human being to that love and that death which is uniquely and vitally his. When a man realizes that he is alone on that silent and shadowless road, then the cry is wrung from him-"Help me; I am helpless, and anything can happen." It is easy to misunderstand Shestov: for example, to take him for a wild man denying the truth of the laws of chance in order to play Russian roulette. But he has nothing against common sense, science, or logic (remembering that by '10gic" Shestov understands the metaphysical logic of Idealism) . He is not an immoralist, or a nihilist. Rather, he is lighting those platitudinous rationalizations by which we all are tempted to blinker ourselves against the harsh brightness and darkness of our existence. His heroes are such figures as Abraham, Job, Oedipus, Hamlet, Wozzeck, Raskolnikov. His work is a philosophy of tragedy. But no review can do justice to the variety and suggestiveness of his aper,us. He must be read to be believed. (DAVID SAVAN) THE BOWERS BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER' The twentieth·century editing of Beaumont and Fletcher has hitherto been a matter of large but unhappy undertakings. "Beaumont and Fletcher"- the quotation-marks are, of course, essential-were along with Shakespeare and Jonson in achieving Folio publication in their own century, and for the next two hundred years the canon was repeatedly made available. But at the . beginning of this century the 'Variorum Edition" (4 volumes, 1904-12), under the general editorship of A. H. Bullen and including several distinguished "'The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. General Editor: Fredson Bowers. Vol. I. Cambridge: At the University Press; [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada.1 1966. Pp. xxxvi, 670. $17.00. 106 CLIFFORD LEECH editors for its separate plays, came to an end after only twenty plays had been published. It was an attempt to do for Beaumont and Fletcher what the "Old Cambridge" edition had done for Shakespeare: it presented a sketch of the textual history, and printed the plays in modern spelling with tidily numbered acts and scenes and lines. Almost simultaneously (10 volumes, 1905-12) the Cambridge University Press undertook an edition in its "Cambridge English Classics" : this was begun by Arnold Glover (who died before the nrst volume appeared) and brought to completion by A. R. Waller. It is only through this edition that most twentieth-century readers have been able to nnd access to many of the plays in the canon, and no one who has used it can fail to be conscious of the shortcomings of what Glover and Waller gave them. Their procedure was to reproduce the Second Folio of 1679 with all its imperfections, with not even a rectilication of its gross mislineations and its arbitrary scene-divisions, with not even the convenience of line-numbering. It is true that in appendices the quarto-editions were collated, but that did not give us a text we could ever quote hom. When anyone has wished to refer to a passage in...