Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre by Joel Schechter, and: The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell' Arte and the Modern Imagination by Martin Green and John Swan (review)

310 Book Reviews argue as King does that the.new industrial "commodity-based society" utterly changes relationships between Aran islanders, as in Riders to the Sea, so that "they are calculated and stated in tenns of price" is plainly wrong, an ex.ample of the loose sociological musing favoured by some modern critics: farming and fishing communities,long before industrialization, always knew that large numbers of healthy children were a valuable asset; the ancient dowry system was a shrewd peasant grasping at the fact that human flesh had a price in relation to its potential for work and wealth. Truer to the play is Errol Durbach's study of it in relation to the world of Greek tragedy. More accurate and interesting is King's aesthetic insight that "Synge's art is the non-literal and non-assertive art of juxtaposed masterful images: the later Yeats learnt much from his technique" (p. 60). Of course Eisenstein would not have agreed with this description of montage, but the cross-cut from Synge to Yeats is a telling one. The chapter on In the Shadow ojthe Glen is succinct and effective in its discussion of the symbolism of location, the syntax of the dialogue, and the dialectic ofcreativity and fixity. The play's elegiac mood is then inverted by the sense ofcarnival in The Tinker's Wedding. King's account rightly takes its cue from Denis Donoghue'S essay "Too Immoral for Dublin."In this chapter drama is at times treated as "more than words upon the page" (p. 93). Synge's play emerges in "the mainstream" of his dramatic mode with its "sources offolk culture and the European comic tradition" (p. 102). The analysis of The Well ofthe Saints, though, suffers from over-ingenious assertion remote from the play on stage: "The couple are working out, through reciprocity, a mode ofaccess to the past which makes it available for the construction of a positive present-and-future" (p. 124). Preposterously, abstracted exegesis fails here to engage Synge's vitality of language. Other instances could be cited from a book whose concern is precisely that vitality. The embarrassingly overblown love-talk of The Playboy cannot really be excused as linguistic exuberance that "strains towards a kind of self-conscious parody" (p. 133). Yet this and the remaining chapters, the best in the book that began as a doctoral thesis (the signs are still there). is interesting in its general approach. but is written in that academic manner which seldom achieves the energy ofgood writing: the best criticism is still the excitement of a vigorous mind engaged with the literary or dramatic work. ANDREW PARKIN , UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA. JOEL SCHECHTER. Durav's Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre. New York: Theatre Communication Group 1985. Pp. ix., 245, illustrated. $12·50. MARTIN GREEN and JOHN SWAN. The Triumph ofPierrot: The Cammedia dell' Arte and the ModemImagination. New York: Macmillan 1986. Pp. xix, 297, illustrated. $25.00. "The commedia dell'arte is not an idea or a meaning, but a collection of images with many meanings. And though one can devise formulas that cover most of them, those formulas will be a bit vague and abstract. They ought to be abstract. and the reader ought Book Reviews 311 to tum, baffled. to the images, to let them speak. for themselves." The Triumph of Pierrot It might rather be suggested that commedia dell'Qrte is a form of unlimited meanings, for the modem view of commedia dell'Grle includes Harlequin and Pierrot, clowns and music hall, circus and carnival, street theater and political satire, silent film comedy, masks and mime, and considerably morc. As Green explains, the influence ofcommedia defies the standard history of ideas brand of scholarship because the fonn has "not exactitude or serious meaning but nonsense, laughter, comedy in the sense of entertainment ... ". The Triumph ofPierrot, and another recent work, Joel Schechter's Durov's Pig. offer unique and fascinating studies of comrnedia and clowning. In recent years interest in cammedia dell'arte has significantly increased. Publication or re-publication of histories of commedia in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries have appeared, studies of its influence on modem playwrights, theatrical perfonnance, and political...