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260 Comparative Drama the gap between language theory and dramatic strategy, yet delivers far less than it sets out to do. The topic Quigley has chosen is suggestive in­ deed, but the thesis itself never becomes more than that. One misses, too, an argument that goes beyond the first decade of Pinter’s playwriting to incorporate the more recent explorations of stage language in Old Times, Monologue, and No Man’s Land. Quigley’s argument (as well as his source material) seems to stop somewhere around 1971 and, though it is always difficult to keep pace with a drama in the making, the book might have been more vital had it been updated. As it now stands, it reads too much like a text which might have been prepared a few years ago. Quigley, nonetheless, has set Pinter criticism in the right direction. It is time indeed to look at this material in the ways in which it allows itself to be discussed: why search for meaning in a script which refuses to give it to us? After all, as Frank Kermode has suggested, the theater is not the post-office, primarily established for the conveyance of messages. There is an art as well as a craft to writing dialogue for the stage and Quigley’s new book, like Andrew Kennedy’s recent Six Dramatists in Search of a Language, pays homage to the word made flesh on stage. ENOCH BRATER University of Michigan Larry Champion. Shakespeare’s Tragic Perspective. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Pp. 279. $11.00. One could do worse than recommend this study to a graduate student in search of a book to read on Shakespeare’s tragedies in preparation for an examination. But one should probably warn him that while he will find here a great deal of what he ought to say, he will get less of what to feel, and he is not likely to encounter much that will make him think or feel in a new way. Champion offers an explanation for this lack of novelty when he asserts that his study supports “what might be called the current consensus” and that it “helps to explain the existence of a consensus among those who have examined Shakespeare’s work more specifically in terms of character, theme, or language” (p. 269). Champion’s desire to remain above partisan squabbles has led him to write rather blandly if safely and competently. Controversial positions are banished to the relative obscurity and constraint of the footnotes, where they jostle each other, kept, as it were, from subverting the con­ sensus. One might wish that the number of authors here noted and quoted had been reduced and those remaining given a longer hearing of their cases so that their sometimes refreshing deviationism had be­ come more apparent. Champion’s text itself, although a little heavy in summaries of plot situations, is cautiously and mostly judiciously formu­ lated; but it quickens its pace only occasionally, such as when he argues in defense of Romeo and Juliet against the minority claim that the lovers are too guilty to deserve audience sympathy. Reviews 261 The avowed first purpose of the book is to trace the development of Shakespeare’s “tragic vision,” but Champion does not fly off, as one might expect after such an announcement, into philosophical or esthetic inquiries; he even keeps genre considerations to a minimum and focuses primarily on analysis of character and action. In fact, he appears to me best in the more technical pursuit he announces as his second purpose, the examination of a developing sophistication in Shakespeare’s dramatic technique. By technique he understands what he calls “structural de­ vices,” that is, means by which the spectator’s view of the tragic pro­ tagonist and of his dilemma are manipulated (but not the scene and act articulation, which he rather neglects). Shakespeare provides such structural devices through secondary characters used as parallels and foils to the protagonist, through subplots and diversionary episodes that reiterate issues or give perspective to them, and through analytical asides and soliloquies that illuminate the tragic struggle by anticipation, emphasis, or contrast. Shakespeare’s skillful use of these devices...

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