Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters by Alan C. Dessen (review)

374 Comparative Drama word on any of them—nor would any critic let him get away with it if he had!— but in many cases his first words provide genuine assistance in helping us see the plays in proper perspective both as dramas and as works of art. The English-speaking world lacks a thorough, standard introduction to Ibsen’s plays. We make do with the sound but brief introductions and the appendices to James McFarland’s The Oxford Ibsen or Michael Meyer’s biography with its decidedly limited critical discussions; prob­ ably the best such guide we possess is the English translation of the re­ vised edition of Halvdan Koht’s Norwegian biography of Ibsen, and perhaps it is time to start thinking of an English translation of the introductions to the standard Norwegian edition of Ibsen, which, written by Koht, Francis Bull, and Didrik Arup Seip, cover the same topics as Archer’s introductions but in a much more thorough and sys­ tematic way. Archer probably never thought of providing such a guide, and his work is too uneven to serve as one, despite Postlewait’s sugges­ tion to the contrary. This volume has to be seen, instead, as one of those works that offer us not Ibsen whole but powerful glimpses of certain aspects of him. As such, it deserves a place upon the shelf. In addition to collecting the essays, Postlewait provides a brief intro­ duction on Archer, headnotes to the essays, supplementary footnotes identifying Archer’s allusions, and an index. The introduction and headnotes help place the writings in perspective without providing any thor­ ough analysis of Archer’s work—presumably this will be done in Postle­ wait’s forthcoming book. The footnotes are certainly useful, but there are too few of them—one would like to know, for example, what Arch­ er is referring to when, having written that When We Dead Awaken “is one of the premonitions of” Ibsen’s “mental breakdown,” he calls it “Ibsen’s Count Robert of Paris." The index seems thorough, but—sur­ prisingly—the heading, “Ibsen, Henrik: Topics” contains no entry for “poetry.” The failure to include Archer’s introductions to Lady Inger and The Feast at Solhaug can be defended, but the introduction to The Vikings at Helgeland is a more substantial piece, and it should be here. Finally, there are a few too many misprints. But the volume displays no major flaws in its editing, and we are in Postlewait’s debt for making these essays available to us. THOMAS F. VAN LAAN Rutgers University Alan C. Dessen. Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 190. $29.95. Written in the school of Harbage, Beckerman, Styan, Bevington, et al„ this volume is a solid historical argument for trying to see Renaissance English plays as a Renaissance Englishman may have seen them. The emphasis is on the viewer’s eye rather than the auditor’s ear. Dessen is concerned with “the striking stage image” (p. 127), the “significant, visible stage detail that is theatrically practical, that conveys some signal deftly to the viewer’s eye” (p. 51), wishing “to establish what effects were Reviews 375 possible, even likely, on the open stage and what assumptions were shared by dramatist, actor, and spectator” (p. 17). Thus “the modem interpreter should make every possible effort to sidestep inappropriate assumptions, conventions, or expectations,” and should see “the surviving documents as theatrical scripts rather than literary texts” (p. 7). We should substi­ tute the “logic” (a favorite word in this study) of the Renaissance stage for the “logic” of the twentieth-century mind. “Our logic, our sense of theatrical conventions,” Dessen insists, can set “real but often invisible limits upon our range of interpretation” (p. 155). For Dessen, “the key to understanding what is distinctive about drama in the age of Shake­ speare lies in the anomalies, the surprises, the moments that make us aware of the full stretch of the dramaturgy” (p. 18). The most important pieces of evidence for this study are stage direc­ tions “from a wide range of plays by experienced dramatists” such as Dekker, Heywood, Fletcher, Massinger, and Shakespeare (p...