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1963 BOOK REVIEWS 89 The other translations by Professor Honig of Brown University. include the delightful comedy The Phantom Lady; Devotion to the Cross, an early Existentialist play; and Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult, in its first appearance in English. Two excellen~ essays are also induded, the ,translator's enlightening comments in fifteen pages on the plays and the Spanish Honor Code, and a thirteen page reprint of Norman Maccoll's discussion of Golden Age drama, still timely though originally published in 1888. Both publishers have bestowed a favor on students of Spanish drama by these volumes. WILLIS KNAPP JOl'OES Miami University IBSEN AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ANGLO·IRISH DRAMA. I. JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE, Jan Setterquist, Upsala Irish Studies NO.2. 1951 • 94 pp. " IBSEN AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ANGLO-IRISH DRAMA II. EDWARD MARTYN, Jan Setterquist, Upsala Irish Studies No. 5, 1960, 115 PP' Mr. Setterquist tells us in a prefatory note to his comparative study of Synge and Ibsen that it was inspired by lectures on English Literature after .ll}Oo given at Upsala University by Professor S. B. Liljegren. who is also the general editor of the Upsala Irish Studies. The appearance of the second book, on Edward Martyn. marks the end of what Mr. Setterquist calls "... the first part of my investigation of Ibsen's influence upon the early Anglo-Irish drama." He does not hint at what paths he will explore in the second part. but one can hazard the guess that he will be looking for traces of the Norwegian master's influence in the early Yeats plays as well as in those of Lady Gregory. Both Yeats and Synge formally repudiated Ibsen, particularly Ibsen of the "problem plays," as a model for Irish playwrights to imitate. It was apparently Ibsen's drawing-room prose, his "joyless and pallid words," as Synge says in his preface to The Playboy, that aroused their antipathy. It is known that Yeats bought the works of Ibsen (in Archer's translation), that he carried them about with him on his travels, and tha,t he saw some London productions of several of the plays. The only evidence we have, however, that Synge was aware of Ibsen is in the two negative and oblique references in the prefaces to The Playboy and to The Tinker's Wedding. There is no documentary evidence that Synge actually read or saw a production of a single Ibsen play. Yet Mr. Setterquist assumes, for the purpose of his study, that not only was Synge familiar with a play such as A Doll's House-a play having world-wide fame and which any literate individual living at the turn of the century would know about. a~ least by hearsay-but that he had read and pondered on minor plays such as The League of Youth and Love's Comedy which only a dedicated Ibsenite would be supposed to have read. This reviewer finds it difficult to believe tha~ what are admittedly parallel situations in Ibsen and Synge plays are necessarily the result of a direct borrowing. The play ih which an individual leaves hearth and horne in answer LO an appeal from the "Beyond," as in In the Shadow of the Glen. is so frequently to be met wi~h in Irish drama that one does not need to look to foreign literary influences to account for it. The theme of the lure of the Land of Heart's Desire is a common one in Irish folktales and in the Old Irish sagas; it would seem more likely 90 MODERN DRAMA May that Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen was inspired by an Irish literary tradition than by A Doll's House. Mr. Setterquist has found an Ibsenian parallel for the situation in each of Synge's plays, even for that most Irish of all stories, Deirdre of the Sorrows. But seeing in the death of Deirdre and Naisi something analogous to the situation in Love's Comedy in which Falk and Svanhild decide not to get married. but to go their separate ways, seems to be straining too hard to find a possible "source." It is also surprising to...

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