Das englische Drama der Gegenwart. Interpretationen ed. by Horst Oppel (review)

358 Comparative Drama romantic concerns. Shapiro then looks at city comedy and masterfully contrasts Dekker’s emphasis on romance in this mode with Middleton’s characteristic preference for satire. Yet there is some overlapping in the boys’ highly experimental theatre. Shapiro concludes that the boys’ preoccupation with self-parody and satire ultimately led to their downfall. Sometimes Shapiro’s organization is difficult to follow. For example, he splits his discussion of Marston’s plays between Chapter Four, where he covers their romantic heroines, and Chapter Six where he then looks at their satiric elements now become dominant. Similarly with Middleton ; some of the same plays are used to illustrate two different ideas in two different places, e.g., abuse or city comedy. Perhaps this is necessary, for Shapiro himself admits that he has “sketched patterns of develop­ ment in the repertoires at the expense of individual plays” (p. 231). He has cast his net wide, to be sure. All in all, Shapiro has written a valuable and in some ways a bril­ liant book. While I may disagree with some of Shapiro’s specific inter­ pretations, there is no doubt that he has illuminated our view of the boy troupes in literary and dramatic history; he has also offered a penetrating study of the theory of drama behind that history. His com­ ments on the specific techniques of and the history behind the theatrical artifices in the boys’ plays do for the private theatre what David Bevington ’s From Mankind to Marlowe and Bernard Beckerman’s Shake­ speare at the Globe 1599-1609 do for the public theatres. PHILIP C. KOLIN University of Southern Mississippi Horst Oppel, ed. Das englische Drama der Gegenwart. Interpretationen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1976. Pp. 262. Horst Oppel, a German scholar of English Literature, has distin­ guished himself as an editor of interpretive volumes dealing with English drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modem English drama, the modern English novel, and modem English poetry. In each instance the interpretations are insightful, informative, and generally of a high level. By turning in the present instance to “contemporary” rather than earlier literature, the editor proves to be less sure of himself. This fact becomes apparent in his search for the common denominators of the fifteen dramas that are analyzed in this volume. In a lengthy introduc­ tion the editor concedes that the period spanned by his samplings (most of the plays were first performed in the sixties and early seventies) will have to wait for the passage of time before anything definitive can be said about them. John Russell Brown is quoted as saying, “To under­ stand the new movement, we must look beyond individual plays. If the best were chosen, they would have remarkably little in common; each would need its own critical terms.” Oppel follows Brown’s lead in affirming that it is true that a variety of labels are offered to charac­ terize the leading movements in English drama, i.e., “kitchen-sink Reviews 359 drama,” “drama of non-Communication,” “absurd drama,” “neo-realist,” “comedy of menace,” “dark comedy,” and “drama of cruelty.” But none of these formulations really succeeds in describing more than a single author or a limited number of dramas. For a time one had the impression that with the New Wave intro­ duced by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a paradigm had been established among contemporary English dramatists with respect to what was worthy of being presented on stage and how it should be presented. But Osborne’s example did not, as might have been expected, result in a school of drama dealing with social protest. One of the outgrowths of Osborne’s drama, according to the editor, is the basic mistrust in all matters dealing with values and commitments to meliorative ideals. A line out of Osborne’s play reads, “I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We have had all that done for us in the thirties and forties, when we were still kids. There aren’t any brave causes left.” According to the editor, to the extent that one can speak of a common denominator...