The Human Image in Dramatic Literature by Francis Fergusson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS THE HUMAN IMAGE IN DRAMATIC LITERATURE, by Francis Fergusson, Anchor, 1957, 217 pp. Price 95c. This collection of essays on drama and literature brings to a wider audience some of the author's reflections previously published in various critical journals or delivered as lectures over the last dozen years or so. The essays are arranged in three groupings: modem theatre, Shakespeare, and critical attitudes. Governed by a consistent view of what is important in theatre and dramatic literature (a view whicb finds full expression in the author's The Idea of a Theater, -1949), the essays have a certain unity within their diversity. Together they show once again the philosophic scope and the lucid prose that distinguish Fergusson's criticism. With mingled disillusionment and hope, he writes of Broadway, of the American theatre between the wars, and of the present situation. Discussing the "ill·defined notion" of "The American Theatre," he briefly chronicles the achievements of the various groups and movements since World War I while noting the absence of anything approaching a national tradition and style of theatre such as France is fortunate to possess. With regard to the academic theatre, he sees it as having played, for the last thirty years, an important if rather obscure part in the theatrical life of the country, and having the possibility of an important future as a laboratory . He is realistically awar~ however, of the pressures which may make a college theatre, in betrayal of the ideals of a liberal education, imitate the shallow slickness of the Broadway entertainment industry and follow the authority of the market. In his sadly ironic analysis of the Broadway situation, Fergusson touches the heart of the matter when he says: «I do not see how our 'Theater' can ever be more than this small and extremely precarious luxury market, unless some common vision of human nature and destiny appears among us." Serious and important dramatists do succeed in the market place, however, and in his study of five contemporary playwrights (Brecht, Wilder, Eliot, Joyce and Lorea) Fergusson discusses how the first three, all allegorists, have tried to come to terms with the demands of a mass audience. He finds in Brecht a brutal and myopic philosophy animating a first-rate dramatic talent. Brecht gives a sense of a "real" world and genuine human conflict, but Fergusson endeavors to show how Brecht, unnaturally cutting off pathos and perception, leaves the audience only with the sense of agon, the first part of the tragic rbythDl which Aristotelian Fergusson insists on as the full and satisfying shape of drama. Where full possession of the Marxian-revolutionary point of view cannot be assumed, he points out, Brecht"s plays might have different effects from those he had planned; there is no guarantee that the uninitiated will catch the right signals and read the allegorical message correctly-a fact which keeps Brecht relatively safe from pabiotic pick- , eting. Wilder is praised as a technician of great skill and imagination who has, however , eluded rather than solved the basic dramatic problem of embodying form and meaning in character and language. Fearful of the distance between the Great Ideas and the generalized characters, dubious about drama of good feeling with so little sense of struggle, Fergusson tends to see Wilder as supplying tranquilizers rather than catharsis. Eliot, whose lyric verse Fergusson greatly admires for its concrete symboliste suggestivity. appears to him somewhat less satisfactory 60 1958 BOOK REvmws 61 as a maker of plays with abstract allegorical shapes imposed on the action. Listening closely to music of The Confidential Clerk he notes, somewhere far behind the visible and audible comedy for polite suburbs, "8 resigned and lyric meditation _ on the ways of Providence"; but for him the distance between that and what Eliot's comedy seems to say is too great. Behind these views is a classical and Aristotelian vi~w of drama that demands that the action be incarnate in individual lives, and a rejection of the Platonic notion of art as directly didactic, of drama as the demonstration of an idea. As against the demonstration of an idea Fergusson prefers the "imitation of an action." The essay...