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346 BOOK REVIEWS curious ways of looking at Shaw. Thus the preface to Major Barbara is found to contain lines on poverty "that oddly recall the Ragpicker's wry speech in Giraudoux's La Faile de Chaillot." Clearly the reverse is true, and a 1962 article even analyzed the Shavian impact on Giraudoux. Perhaps in general Valency discovers more continental origins for Shavian drama than exist in fact because his mind is attuned to the most subtle European parallels; for although Shaw was not unaware of what was going on in Germany, France and Scandinavia, his theatrical tradition is very clearly English, from the morality play to the music hall. But Valency's perspective is a useful corrective to our seeing Shaw only in terms of his Anglo-Irish heritage and only in terms of his being confessedly "a natural-born mountebank." Delicacy of touch was not for him, Shaw had written early in his playwriting career: "The cart and trumpet for me." But, Valency observes, Shaw soon ventured into "contemporary mysticism" - as early, in fact, as Candida, although he did so in "extremely circumspect" fashion in order to retain his Fabian credentials. "In this manner," writes Valency, "having rejected in the name of realism, all the traditional values of romance, Shaw retrieved them one by one as realistic expressions of the Life Force. By shifting his axis from the self-interest of the individual to the self-interest of the species, he was able to reconcile individualism with socialism, and realism with idealism, and thus to place his characters on a level where their extravagance could be justified in terms of a higher morality." Only an afterthought in The Cart and the Trumpet, it is a provocative approach to the plays, and one of the many shrewd observations for which critics and scholars will keep returning to Valency's book. STANLEY WEINTRAUB The Pennsylvania State University A SOCIOLOGY OF POPULAR DRAMA, by J. S. R. Goodlad. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972; London: Heinemann, 1971. x & 230 pp. £3.50. Dr. Goodlad works in a doubly difficult field for he is. concerned with drama and also with sociology. Lucien Goldmann argued in The Hidden God (1955): "the mass of texts which have only an average or an inferior value are, at the same time, difficult to analyse by the sociological historian or the aesthetician" and, as Dr. Goodlad himself says, the "increasingly vast critical literature dealing with popular drama ... is an uneasy mixture of psychoanalytical , sociological, philosophical, and literary criticism" (p. 52). Inevitably his book is subject to attack from many points of view and I would say at once that, although it has limitations - as is to be expected of a study of moderate length at this stage of our knowledge - it does what it sets out to do very well: provide a prolegomenon for a thorough sociological investigation into the place of popular drama in society. If I concentrate on what seem to me, from my approach to drama, to be limitations, I would not have that discount the value of Dr. Goodlad's study, especially to those who are BOOK REVIEWS 347 concerned primarily with drama and for whom a sociological approach may, perhaps, be suspect. "The theory outlined in this book," says Dr. Goodlad, "put crudely, is that popular dramas offer the sociologist the equivalent of the engineers' strain gauges. The themes of the popular dramas reveal the places where interlocking forces produce potential instability - they 'express' an aspect of the overall culture" (pp. 194-95). Put in a more sophisticated way it might be said to be part of that programme for a sociology of the theatre outlined by George Gurvitch in Les lettres nouvelles in 1956, for Dr. Goodlad is concerned with the social functions of the theatre and the relationship between the content of popular dramas and the social system. The drama which most concerns him is argued as being a form of mass communication the theatre-play which achieves a long run and the television play that attracts an enormous audience. Much of Dr. Goodlad's book is a survey of work by sociologists and their colleagues on popular art forms...

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