Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Critical Edition ed. by William Davies King: Critical Edition (review)

According to the Yale University Press website, Long Day’s Journey Into Night became the fastest-selling title in the history of the press when it was first published in 1956 and has remained ever since one of its more successful books. This new critical edition marks the sixty-first printing of O’Neill’s greatest play. A prefatory note from the publisher, first written in 1989, thanks scholars Judith Barlow, Stephen Black, and Michael Hinden for calling attention to several textual errors in previous editions of the play, including the Library of America three-volume edition of Complete Plays edited by Travis Bogard in 1988 to commemorate the centennial of the playwright’s birth. Still, those errors, corrected in all recent editions, do not amount to much. Who needs to add, then, another copy of the play to the bookshelf?

The real value of this volume begins on page 181 at the conclusion of O’Neill’s family tragedy. In the next eighty pages or so, editor William Davies King sorts a lot of information on the playwright, his play, and the time in which he wrote into five distinct sections. “An O’Neill Chronology” reads similarly to the ones written by Bogard in the centennial anthologies, but King summarizes O’Neill’s career in just three pages and ends not with the playwright’s death, but with the publication of the great play in 1956. King matches the quick gloss on O’Neill’s career with an annotated bibliography in the final section that provides an up-to-date list of primary and secondary sources on the play and playwright, including films and documentaries, as well as all the important critical and biographical studies of the playwright. Scholars and students would do well to review this section prior to the start of any research project on O’Neill.

The other three sections prove to be the most original and illuminating parts of this edition. King starts with “Notes and Context” in which he discusses the influence of culture and literature within the Tyrone/O’Neill family and details the contents of the father and son bookcases in the opening stage directions of the play in order to articulate an aesthetic and generational clash that informs all the action. The section ends with a list of literary allusions and quotations from the play, from Shakespeare to Swinburne to slang phrases from the horsetrack such as “That goes for Sweeny.” In the longest of the five sections, “Historical and Critical Perspectives,” King cites the recently recovered Exorcism and the notes for an unfinished work called “The Sea-Mother’s Son” as early attempts by O’Neill to dramatize his life story that did not come to full fruition until Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Among many subtle observations, King notes that the setting in 1912 coincides with the tail end of James O’Neill’s long and successful acting career, a fact that compels sympathy and compassion for the miserly father in the play. King balances his appreciation for autobiography with an equal nod to the artifice of the play (and a credit to Doris Alexander) and points out that O’Neill’s masterpiece is a different kind of tragedy, not one with mythic characters but with ordinary people. On the play’s poetic conclusion, King writes with ease and simplicity: “But the upshot is that they will bear on through other days, because that is what life is” (215). Though grounded in American history and constructed as if it really were a pivotal day in 1912 for young Eugene O’Neill, the problems in the play nevertheless still speak to a contemporary audience. “It is a play a reader can grow through” (219), King asserts, meaning that an audience can relate to different characters in different ways and in different times with subsequent readings or viewings.

In “The...