James Bridie: Clown and Philosopher by Helen L. Luyben (review)

466 MODERN DRAMA February today an inadequate vessel for the living actor, dancer, singer whose physical presence in the hall is sometimes the only advantage to be had over the same performer exhibited on the motion picture screen or the home television set. This advantage must be seized and capitalized upon if the live performer is to make his proper impact. Happily, most architects and theater consultants are coming to recognize this basic demand and exploit it, as the many plans and pictures of Contemporary Theatre Architecture bear witness. NORRIS HOUGHTON Vassar College IRISH RENAISSANCE, edited by Robin Skelton and David R. Clark, The Dol· men Press, Dublin, 1965, 167 pp. Price 35s. The subtitle adequately indicates the scope of Irish Renaissance: "A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs, Letters and Dramatic Poetry from the Massachusetts Review." This was, after all, the centennial year of Yeats's birth, and many of the pieces commemorate the literary and personal record of a Sligo poet who, if any man ever did, moved inevitably toward the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nothing startling, however. A speech that Yeats made in America (1932-1933); miscellaneous com· ments about pantheism, form, and Castiglione's The Courtier written while The Player Queen was being composed; letters of 1918 containing shrewd assessments of lecture audiences; and a perceptive study by David R. Clark of "the order of the early manuscripts of The Shadowy Waters," which suggests that George Moore, in helping Yeats to shape the play for the stage, did infinite mischief to an exciting literary idea. The letters between John Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory, edited by G. O'Malley and D. T. Torchiana, cast interesting lights and shadows on a remarkable man; but the main outline was clear before. David Krause's sketch of Sean O'Casey's final moods and comments is unsenti· mentally affectionate; the great affirmation of O'Casey's autobiography is docu· mented here in a number of small but telling anecdotes, and it should not be referred to as another "memorial piece," as if its tone were somehow lugubrious. (An appropriate bow is also made to the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. When a book is presented as "triply a memorial one," the atmosphere thickens alarmingly.) Two contributions of more than passing interests are Ann Saddlemyer's editing of the texts of several letters written by Synge to his close friend, Stephen MacKenna (quoted in part by David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens in their fine biography of Synge), and Richard M. Kain's meticulous identification of the ways in which Joyce used his sources to establish a chronology of Shakespeare's life. The selections, a baker's dozen in all, make for pleasant reading, and the volume is handsomely printed; but the price seems a little elevated, and, for the most part, such materials are best suited to publication in a scholarly periodical such as The Massachusetts Review. HAROLD OREL University of Kansas JAMES BRIDIE: CLOWN AND PHILOSOPHER, by Helen L. Luyben, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1965, 180 pp. Price $5.00. In this study of twelve selected plays by Bridie, Miss Luyben's chief purpose is to show that in spite of his inexhaustible comic sense he is a serious dramatist, and that all his plays are, in a way, moralities. Her second aim is to disprove the opinion of some critics that his plays are carelessly constructed, inconclusive, 1967 BOOK REVIEWS 467 and ambiguous. She argues that· they are constructed with meticulous care, and that the ambiguity found in them is inherent in his method-a pitting of thesis against antithesis in an attempt to reach an unreachable truth. Noting Bridie's admiration for Ibsen and Shaw, she points out the similarity of his method to Ibsen's "philosophical relativism" and Shaw's "judicial ambiguity." It is surprising that she does not also mention Hegel, for in "Equilibrium," an essay of Bridie's from which she quotes, he credits Hegel with having taught him a method of dialectic. She examines the plays under three headings: "Songs of Innocence" (Tobias and the Angel, Marriage Is No Joke, The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go to Kuala Lumpur, The...