Poetic Drama as Mirror of the Will by Michael Black (review)

Reviews 269 that the power-games of princes, modern as well as ancient, were equally ruthless regardless of who played them or the philosophical principles they professed to play them by. The point is well taken and well made. Adams’s essay will take its proper place, one hopes, as the first chapter in a book-length study of those plays just mentioned; but it has implica­ tions for a good many other plays as well, including Shakespeare’s histories and several of his tragedies. The fourth essay is Louise George Clubb’s “Woman as Wonder; A Generic Figure in Italian and Shakespearean Comedy.” Professor Cubb’s essay is one of the best in the book and also the only one that is strictly speaking an essay in comparative drama. Noting that other scholars have already related Shakespeare’s All’s Well and Measure for Measure to Italian tragicomedy, she declares that these two plays are most closely related to that kind of tragicomedy called commedia grave, particularly the kind in which the woman functions as vehicle for idea. Shakespeare, she notes, went one step further and annexed a ritual religious dimension to what had been secular drama, creating thereby a series of women “quivering with transcending significance.” Professor Clubb does not push the point beyond the point of credibility. “Identification of Isabella as the soul of man, elected to be the Bride of Christ in an allegory of the divine atonement,” she writes, “is not requisite to recognizing that she is a vehicle for idea and that here personal, visible action may in­ carnate onstage in the realm of the particular and local a human possi­ bility that has another existence in that of the general and the universal.” Professor Clubb’s sane presentation of this aspect of Shakespeare’s middle plays may encourage acceptance of it by some who would prefer to deny any metaphysical dimension at all there. At any rate, her sug­ gestion about what was happening in these two plays should rule out further suspicions of dyspepsia at this point in Shakespeare’s career. For that service alone the book is a credit to its editors and easily worth the modest price. J. A. BRYANT, JR. The University of Kentucky Michael Black. Poetic Drama as Mirror of the Will. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977. Pp. 203. $16.50. According to the Preface, this book developed out of Mr. Black’s interest in Wagner’s vision of himself “as the culminating point of a European dramatic art, not just a German musical art.” After meditating on a selection of the works of Wagner’s theatrical forebears, Black has set out to explore “some of the analogies between the arts, . . . [taking] care to preserve the distinctions between them which in the end make the analogies between poetry and music only analogies” (p. 7). What might we expect from a book so conceived? The title gives us a clue: the plays from which analogies are drawn are in some sense “poetic” (though Black himself questions this criterion in Chapter 10). Poetic 270 Comparative Drama drama from the Greeks to roughly 1870 offers the author many choices, even if the selection were limited to those plays Wagner might be as­ sumed to have known. However, Mr. Black makes no further reference to his method for choosing either playwrights or particular plays to discuss. The emphasis on Wagner in the Preface is perhaps misleading: he merits only 17 entries in the index. The parameters of the book may have been determined by his vision of himself, but little actual reference is made either to him or to his works. The Preface speaks grandly of “analogies between the arts,” and yet opera as a subject receives a total of eight citations in the index, painting, none. Granted that Mr. Black does not promise an exhaustive exploration of analogies between Wagner and his poetic precursors, we might still expect some guidelines as to what kinds of analogies interest him. The other part of the title, “Mirror of the Will,” could lead to a comparison of philosophical views of man­ kind as contained in drama across this timespan; or it could lead...