Shaw on shakespeare; An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare ed. by Edwin Wilson (review)

250 MODERN DRAMA September capable of delicate and subtle effects impossible in the big theaters. "The measure of all arts' greatness," Yeats concludes, "can be but in their intimacy." Though much concerned with the huge questions that have always plagued aestheticians-the nature of tragedy and of comedy (the tragic figure, Yeats once remarked, moves away from "character," the comic figure toward it), the function of poetry in drama, the role of imagery in poetic composition, etc.Yeats was also an enthusiastic participant in scholarly controversy. Shocked by the critical celebration of Henry V as Shakespeare's "ideal king" and of Richard II as Shakespeare's "weak" king, Yeats characteristically rose in Richard's defense. Setting Richard ("that unripened Hamlet," "the vessel of porcelain") against Henry ("that ripened Fortinbras," "the vessel of clay"), he insists that Shakespeare's attitude toward successful Henry was eminently ironic: His purposes are so intelligible to everybody that everybody talks of him as if he succeeded although he fails in the end, as all men great and little fail in Shakespeare. His conquests abroad are made nothing by a woman turned warrior. That boy he and Katherine were to "compound," "half French, half English," "that" was to "go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard," turns out a saint and loses all his father had built up at home and his own life. Uncompromising, argumentative, and honest, Yeats fought always for goodnot expedient-art. And in his fight he made more than his share of enemies. These, particularly the loud representatives of the mob that wants art always to be nothing more than its own flattering portrait, Yeats assigned, to "the world." Himself he assigned, perhaps rightly, to the company of conscious artists, wise in their creative vision. "The world," he summed up, "knows nothing because it has made nothing, we know everything because we have made everything." JOHN UNTERECKER Columbia University SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE; An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, edited, and with an Introduction, by Edwin Wilson. New York, Dutton, 1961. $4.50. Every man Paper $1.75. Edwin Wilson has brought together the great majority of Shaw's significant comments on the plays, dramatic methods, productions, and interpreters of Shakespeare. The volume is unquestionably a welcome one. We now have the familiar but scattered pieces, plus a few that are relatively elusive, conveniently at our fingertips, assembled and arranged to be read straight through. We can at last absorb Shaw's observations on Hamlet, for example, without first tracking down six different sources. Wilson's introduction sums up his subject in fourteen businesslike and uncontroversial pages; it lacks only a bibliography to make it an excellent propaedeutic for the uninitiated. The edition does not aspire to the quality of Walter Raleigh's lohnson on Shakespeare (not to speak of T. M. Rayson's job on Coleridge), but it is one that we will buy, use, and presumably profit from until something better supplants it. It could not have been a complete edition by a long shot. Dan Laurence's Soho bibliography of Shaw, his microprint edition of the early writings, and his series of reprints (touched off with How to Become a Musical Critic) will unveil a whole new corpus of obscurely published Shaviana. Shaw's unpublished letters, another long-term Laurence project, will inevitably touch upon Shakespeare here and there. It would have been futile for Wilson to duplicate Laurence's monumental labors just for the sake of a Dutton appeal to the bulk of academe. 1962 BOOK REVIEws 251 Still, Wilson might have included everything of note that scholars have already recorded. He appropriated an amusing letter on The Taming of the Shrew from Archibald Henderson's final biography, but he either missed or chose not to print two equally interesting items (see pages 143 and 699). At the April 25, 1884, meeting of the Browning Society (chaired by James Russell Lowell, who unfortunately did not clash with Shaw), Shaw extemporaneously compared Shakespeare's Caliban with Browning's. Henderson omits Shaw's most illuminating words, which are worth re-exposing. After declaring that Browning is "essentially undramatic" in contrast to...