The Creacion of the World: A Critical Edition with Translation ed. by Paula Neuss (review)

Reviews 95 images from Arrabal’s dream world are seen to be unleashed by the dramatist upon a theatre audience without any apparent rational shaping of that material. Communication is dependent upon the play’s awakening of a festive spirit in the spectator just as a festival participant must enter a world of “primordial chaos” in which normal prohibitions are trans­ gressed, until the return to order at the end of the festival. According to Arata, “Arrabal’s dramas perform the festive double gesture of decon­ struction and re-creation by presenting the world in pieces and holding the fragments within basic structures whose existence does not become totally evident until the end” (p. 81). Arata raises provocative questions about the potential audience for a theatre that functions as a festival but whose participants (spectators) come together without a common cause to celebrate. Like Arrabal’s end­ ings, which do not offer resolutions but “the possibility of new beginnings,” Arata’s book points the way to further work on the inexhaustibly rich creations of Arrabal. Arata does not pretend to tackle in all its com­ plexity the work of an artist whose latest genre-defying novel, La Torre herido por el rayo (1983), proceeds from a tarot card through chess diagrams interspersing a humorous, philosophical adventure story replete with literary and political references. What Arata does set out to cover is handled skillfully and thought-provokingly. And his providing a Selected Bibliography, Notes, and an Index helps complete this useful book. FELICIA HARDISON LONDRfi University of Missouri-Kansas City The Creadon of the World: A Critical Edition with Translation, ed. and trans. Paula Neuss. New York: Garland, 1983. Pp. Ixxxii + 249; 7 plates. $50.00. Celtic literature in its earliest development had no drama. Only Corn­ wall and Brittany can provide us with liturgical drama which came at the end of the Middle Ages from either French or English models. Sometimes saints’ lives were dramatized, as in the Beunans Meriasek (Life of St. Meriadocus) in Cornish or the Breton Buhez Sant Nonn (Life of St. Nonn, the legendary mother of St. David of Wales). The Cornish mystery plays come down to us in what Celticists call Middle Cornish, a Celtic language in vocabulary and syntax with a great admixture of Middle English as well as Latin and French. The Creadon of the World (Gwreans an Bys) dates from sometime in the late fifteenth century and there is a manuscript dated 1611 in which the text has come down to us, but it must have been copied from an earlier book. It was first mentioned by Richard Carew in his Survey of Cornwall (London, 1602) as an inter­ lude. This play has special interest for students of medieval drama in that it contains stage directions in English in an archaic form. A new edition of the play has been long overdue; Whitley Stokes’ edition of 1863 has been out of print for a long time as is also that of Norris, The Ancient Cornish Drama, which contained the text and a translation (Oxford, 1859). Stokes filled whole shelves with editions of various 96 Comparative Drama Celtic texts, Irish, Breton, and Cornish; but he worked rapidly and emended freely as he went along. He often worked far from libraries, and some of his work was done on shipboard, plying between England and India, for he was in the English Indian service for many years. When his work was critically reviewed, he accepted corrections in an easy manner, then pointed out the errors which the reviewer had failed to notice! In 1959 R. Morton Nance and A. S. D. Smith produced a mimeographed edition for popular use as part of the recent revival in interest in the Cornish language and its literature. The present edition retains the reading of the original unique manu­ script, Bodleian MS. 219, variant readings of Stokes and Nance being noted at the foot of the page. In those places where an emendation has been made, the manuscript reading has been carefully collated with those of Stokes and Nance. Abbreviations have been silently expanded, prob­ ably because the book has been photographed from typescript and italics could not be...