Guide to Play Selection by the Committee on Playlist of the N. C. T. E., Joseph Mersand (review)

1959 BoOK REvrEws 205 Some of its less happy features may perhaps be explained by its origin as a doctoral dissertation (Columbia, 1955); and let it be said at once that Mr. Kaye has triumphed over the limitations of that particularly intractable medium more resoundingly than most of his colleagues. Of necessity, the Ph.D. candidate takes for his province a more or less restricted subject; anything lying beyond is either ignored or dismissed in glittering generalities. Thus, Mr. Kaye's initial chapter, five pages long, grandiloquently titled «The Nineteenth-Century Tradition," makes rather painful reading. The author, whose closing footnote reveals that he is a hit embarrassed about the whole thing himself, propounds a highly simplified view of what he takes to be the three stages of nineteenth-century intellectual history: the "tradition," he says, proceeded from romanticism to materialism to a synthesis of the two apparently antithetical positions, of which synthesis Shaw was an eloquent spokesman. Possibly; but the case needs a much fuller exposition than Mr. Kaye is able to give here. When he settles down to a discussion of the writers whom he considers part of this tradition, Mr. Kaye reveals himself to be the victim of a misconception which often bedevils scholars and academic critics: the notion that a writer can be "explained" by the intellectual forces to which he is exposed. Certainly they are to be taken into consideration, and Mr. Kaye has rendered us a great service in bringing some of the less well-known ones to light; but, as biographers like St. John Ervine have shown, many other forces contributed to the development of Shaw's ideas and these forces Mr. Kaye necessarily ignores. His concentration on literary influences is part of the general solemnity of his approach, and solemnity is a serious defect in a writer on Shaw, who was at least as much playboy as prophet. How much of Shaw's latter-day political theorizing, one wonders, was uttered tongue in cheek, in a mockperverse attempt to outrage the Anglo-American public? Is Jack Tanner's closing speech really best taken as evidence that the buoyant protagonist of Man and Superman is a disciple of Schopenhauer, as Mr. Kaye suggests on pp. 116-117? Mr. Kaye's method is open to further question in his frequent blurring of the distinction between influences and parallels. For instance, he devotes nearly twice as much space to James, whose work Shaw probably did not know, as to Butler, who has long been rightly considered one of the major formative influences on Shaw's thought. Another example: the case for the inclusion of Arnold seems weak; the similarities between Arnold's religious thought and Shaw's are superficial, and their notions of Christ and Christianity were shared by many nineteenth-century thinkers. GEORGE J. WORTH GUIDE TO PLAY SELECTION, by the Committee on Playlist of the N. C. T. E., Joseph Mersand, Chairman, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1958, 178 pp. Price, $3.50. Milton Smith's original Guide to Play Selection, published in 1934, had long been considered a standard work on play selection. Responsibility for authorship in this revised and expanded second edition, however, belongs to the Committee on Playlist sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English. The committee consisted of five members: Joseph Mersand, Francis Griffith, Marcus Konick, Paul Kozelka, and M. Jerome 'Weiss. According to the preface, selection of plays was decided on a co-operative basis with the list of plays being approved by each member of the committee. The criteria for inclusion was based on a play's suitability for production by school, college, or community theaters. As such, the authors were not necessarily trying to choose the 206 MODERN DRAMA September "best" plays of any particular era or author but those whose production is most feasible oil a non-professional level. As a result, Hamlet gave way to The Taming of the Shrew and Back to Methuselah to Fanny's F.irst Play. The selected summaries are divided into four groups of plays: Full-length, One-Act, Television, and Guidance and Mental Health. Each of these groups has a very concise but well-written...