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1962 BOOK REVIEWS 249 abandon one's firm hold on a broom for a much more tenuous hold on a pure idea. Yet Saint-Denis' views provide an intellectual underpinning for a new, enlarged American theater. His book comes at a time when the shift away from the kitchen sink is becoming apparent in New York on and off Broadway. He may have arrived at the psychological moment to express his views. Whether he discusses classicism and realism and the relationship of style and reality, as he does in the first several lectures, or his own principles as a director and teacher, as he does in the last third of the book. Saint-Denis is consistently lucid. explicit. readable, and reasonable. One comes away with the feeling that actors,directors. designers and others working within his framework would deve10p a wide range of ability, a set of more consistently fresh and apt approaches . than those trained in The Method, without any sacrifice in quality in those areas in which The Method has proved itself valuable. Saint-Denis says: eel believe that a classical discipline equips you with sharper instruments with which to penetrate to the depth of realism." Not only that; it also equips you to perfonn the classics, in the English as well as the French sense of that word. Most American actors and men of the theater lack that equipment. HENRy KNEPLER Illinois Institute of Technology ESSAYS AND INTRODUCTIONS, by W. B. Yeats, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1961, 530 pp. Price $6.50. In "An Introduction to My Plays." one of the hitherto unpublished essays he had written for a projected complete edition of his works, Yeats. shortly before his death, attempted to sum up both his ambitions and his accomplishments: "I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung and, because I did not understand my own instincts, gave half a dozen wrong or secondary reasons; but a month ago I understood my reasons ... 'Write for the ear: I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when actor or folk singer stands before an audience." That Yeats had not always been instantly understood. at least by a good part of his audience, is of course amply attested by the reception of his plays during his lifetime. His audience, as he pointed out, wanted comedies by Lady Gregory and Synge and O'Casey and not the sort of lyrical tragedy he had been constructing . And though by the late thirties. Yeats had won some of his audience over to the intense. stark drama that evolved out of 1890 symbolist studies and 1916 Noh experiments, his dramas were generally regarded as minor accomplishments of a major poet. And his eloquent. inventive and frequently controversial comments on drama, by that time out of sight in unreprinted essays and prefaces, left him little in the way of self-defense against those who were judging him. Now that many of those essays are back in print in Macmillan's handsome new edition, it seems vividly clear that time has been on Yeats' side. For instance, his observations in "Certain Noble Plays of Japan," though written in 1916, forcefully state the case for theater-in-the-round-more forcefully and more eloquently, in fact, than most of that theater's contemporary proponents: "It is well to be close enough to an artist to feel for him a personal liking, close enough perhaps to feel that our liking is returned." Close to the actor, one can experience the "separating strangeness" of the actor's characterization, as the actor whom we recognize becomes for the duration of the play Oedipus or Lear, a transfonned, different self inhabited by the passions of an imagined person. Close to the audience, the carefully trained technician, the actor who calculates his perĀ£onnance, can be 250 MODERN DRAMA September capable of delicate and subtle effects impossible in the big theaters. "The measure of all arts' greatness," Yeats concludes, "can be but in their intimacy." Though much concerned with the huge questions that have always plagued aestheticians-the nature of tragedy and of comedy (the tragic figure, Yeats once remarked, moves away from...

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