Drama, Dance and Music ed. by James Redmond (review)

374 Comparative Drama a friend’s work”—p. 263), but from at least some of the evidence I got a sense of different appeals associated with different playhouses (par­ ticularly through the repeated allusions to the Red Bull), whether those distinctions are to be attributed to a greater plebeian presence or to the presence of a different element of the privileged minority. A bit more concern with the potential variations in taste among the privileged or a somewhat higher attendance by plebeians at a few of the theaters might have forestalled any such objections. But such small qualifications should not detract from the solid achieve­ ment of this book which should be read by anyone with an interest in drama in the age of Shakespeare. Cook avoids what she terms “a kind of upward mobility of misperception,” a transformation of “an audience once seen as louts or sturdy artisans into an audience of fine gentlemen” (p. 10), but rather offers a reasoned, well documented case (accompanied by useful maps, tables, and bibliography) that, if attended, could do what few works of criticism succeed in doing—change the way we perceive drama and playgoing at the Globe. ALAN C. DESSEN University of North Carolina Drama, Dance and Music (Themes in Drama, 3), ed. James Redmond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. xviii + 254. $36.00. Except for its short lapse into realism at the end of the last century, the history of the stage shows that music has always been an integral part of the art and expression of drama, not only as an adjunct extending the emotional statement of the action for pathos or comedy, but also at great moments as a force by which dramatic speech has risen from poetry to song. The pervasive presence of music both instrumental and vocal in Shakespeare, or more astonishingly in the realistic Chekhov, comes as a surprising revelation. So, too, with dance: if the stage had not itself prompted the choreography of masque or ballet as independent art forms, then the stylizing of movement and gesture in drama has always thrust it towards the edge of terpsichorean expression. It did not need Wagner and his concept of the total art work to remind us that drama was (happily) never “pure” in form, but a composite of many arts; that a shaping rhythm is at the heart of any performing art that must move in time; and that the words of a play invite us to seek out the music and dance of the text that can bring them to life. Only a periodical publication on the scale of Cambridge University Press’s annual Themes in Drama under the editorship of James Redmond could perhaps have entertained the notion of a whole book on the sub­ ject of drama, dance, and music. This excellent series, appearing just at the time when drama is being seen as a worthy subject for study and research in a few enterprising places (although, ironically, not in Cam­ bridge itself), could yet be the forum for international scholarship in all those cross-disciplinary areas which drama joyfully embraces, and the choice of topics for the first three volumes (“Drama and Society” and Reviews 375 “Drama and Mimesis” were numbers 1 and 2) suggests that this will be its strength. Volumes 4 and 5 are announced as “Drama and Symbolism” and “Drama and Religion,” topics which again point to the essential interrelationship of otherwise disparate themes from which drama as a form takes its life. As for “Drama, Dance and Music,” the very fact that drama juxtaposes and superimposes the visual and aural senses in innumerable ways would seem to make this new volume a prime item for the drama student’s shelf. However, I confess to a niggling disappointment, since this volume falls short of being the exciting seminal collection it might have been. Not just that one-third of the book is given to unrelated matter (two otherwise praiseworthy features of the series are the unrestricted long review article and a “forum” for discussion, so that in volume 3 this formula permits a near-monograph survey of the plays of John Ford of 36 pages and an...