Jonson and Elizabethan Comedy. Essays in Dramatic Rhetoric by L. A. Beaurline (review)

Reviews 271 As we might predict after such a statement, Chapter 5 extends the same kind of analysis of verbal music to another masterpiece, Othello. No later English writer receives any significant mention in the book. Chapter 6 moves on to a discussion of Phèdre. (An Appendix elaborates on the word patterns in her confession to Hippolyte; it appears to be material cut out of the chapter in the interests of proportion.) Chapter 7—a six-page note—shifts backwards in time to mention that Spain also had some great playwrights: Tirso de Molina and Calderon. Lope de Vega, whose practice set the form of the comedia, is not even mentioned here. Chapters 8 through 10 degenerate into a sketch of literary/critical history of drama, concluding with what Black himself calls a “derog­ atory” comparison of Ibsen to Wagner (p. 8). The book ends with the assertion that opera is a more serious art form than theatre because music “needs no translation and for most ordinary hearers no commen­ tary. Music in the theatre links the universal language to a communal or popular art” (p. 172). It is difficult to know quite what to say about this book. It skims superficially over a wide territory, adding nothing to our knowledge of particular texts and writers, and making, finally, no overall statement beyond the obvious. There is no controlling purpose established, much less carried out. “Wagnerian music drama has given us terms to reflect backwards . . . turning them on the analysis of Shakespearean or Racinian drama” (p. 11). But what terms, and to what end? Mr. Black, who is Executive Publisher of the Cambridge University Press, dashes through his survey with great brio but without, I fear, accomplishing very much. In this muddle of appreciative enthusiasm he feels no obli­ gation to document the sources of his facts (even direct quotations are not footnoted) nor to acknowledge the existence of previous critics. This is certainly not a scholarly book (indeed, I cannot imagine what use it could be to anyone acquainted with the subject matter), but neither does it seem to hold much appeal for the general reader. Some “super­ ficial” books manage to throw out provocative ideas; this one, unfor­ tunately, does not. JUDITH MILHOUS University of Iowa L. A. Beaurline. Jonson and Elizabethan Comedy. Essays in Dramatic Rhetoric. San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1978. Pp. xi + 351. $14.50. This book hardly lives up to its main title, or to its claim that most of the essays are comparative, since the comedies most fully compared with Jonson’s are Sapho and Phao and A Midsummer N ighfs Dream, and these are fitter for contrast than for parallel. The subtitle gives a somewhat better description, though still not exact. The most interesting essays discuss “The Wonder of Comic Satire,” “Comic Language in 272 Comparative Drama Volpone,” “The Design of The Alchemist and Epicoene,” and “The Real Presence of Vulgarity in Bartholomew Fair.” The author is at his best when he emphasizes “the special pleasures” of Jonson’s comedies, his sense of fun, and his “superbly evocative language.” Beaurline turns over the coin of Jonson’s comic satires to show the other side, “comedy of admiration.” He observes that Cynthia’s Revels seems most like Elizabethan court comedy because here, like Lyly and Shakespeare, “Jonson seriously tries to evoke the excitement of admir­ ation” for an exalted ideal, love of an almost unearthly perfection, as well as to show up the triviality and pretense of self-love (p. 121). Cyn­ thia views the masques of Crites “Not without wonder, not without delight.” Poetaster, Beaurline notes, “combines a remarkable intensity of feeling with high principles” and “still asks for our admiration of the highest conceptions, the Idea of a poet in Virgil.” But Jonson “had al­ ready outgrown the delicate instability of the Elizabethan mode,” and from now on, admiration would have its place mainly in his court masques. He had to shift comedy’s focus from the court to the city, no longer to woo his hearers by embattled vices and virtues but to laugh them heartily out of their folly. Here Beaurline undervalues what he calls “the simple charms...