More Plays in Paperbacks

...Though not all readers will agree (The Critic is most successful, I think, for that part of the audience familiar with both sides of the footlights) , all readers will recognize in Sheridan one of the world's great comic dramatists...

...Everyone who has been exposed to it, in or out of the theater, knows how funny The School for Scandal is...

...Mentor's Eight Great Tragedies ($.50) is the bargain of the day, however...

...Offering the complete texts of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Sophocles's Oedipus the King, Eu-ripides's Hippolytus, Shakespeare's King Lear, Ibsen's Ghosts, Strind-berg's Miss Julie, Yeats's On Baile's Strand, and O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, and throwing in for good measure comments on tragedy by Aristotle, Hume, Emerson, E. M. W. Tillyard, I. A. Richards and Joseph Wood Krutch, the book seems so valuable that one is tempted not to say that some of the translations seem less than lively (or even less than contemporary...

...Sheridan, who wrote brilliantly within a tradition, created no new forms...

...A third Mermaid Dramabook, selections from the plays of John Ford ($1.65), is a real publisher's gamble...

...The madman in this play is no funny creature for the audience to laugh at but rather a sick man who through a kind of introspective dialogue with a thoughtful doctor manages to talk out his problem...

...That that growth culminated in his last play The Critic is the contention of Louis Kronen-berger in his fine introduction to the volume...

...The Lover's Melancholy is, for instance, one of the first sympathetic studies of madness...

...If Shakespeare has been well represented in paperbacks, hardly any religious drama has been printed...

...I'll never forget my college reading of the expensive blinding anthologies which crammed 35 copiously footnoted plays into 600 illegible pages...

...Yet, reading it in the context of the complete Sheridan (Mermaid Dramabook, $1.45), one becomes almost immediately conscious of Sheridan's great growth in both wit and theatrical craftsmanship as he discovers for himself the limits and the nature of his talent...

...So far six plays, King Henry IV, Part /, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, each selling at $.75, have been made available...

...Michael Gazzo's I Hatful of Rain (Signet $.351) on the other hand, demonstrates that, in spite of all sorts of theatrically powerful situations and the compelling subject of drug addiction, a play with neither eloquence nor characterization will be bound to make dull reading...

...And Terence Rattigan's film-script of The Prince and the Show-Girl (Signet, $.35) demonstrates nothing more, so far as I can see, than that a good dramatist can make a mistake...

...Meridian's Living Age Books plans to issue three volumes covering this area...

...And Christopher Fry's play about Moses, The Firstborn, is both eloquent and craftsmanlike...

...And, as Broadway has recently discovered, French farce (represented in this collection by Scribe's A Peculiar Position and Sardou's A Scrap of Paper) is still very funny...

...The most ambitious publisher in this field is Hill and Wang, whose Dramabook series now includes eight collections of plays and ten volumes of drama criticism...

...But the book offers so much that this complaint is really a small one...

...And though it is still possible to think of areas (French symbolist drama) and authors (Gerhart Hauptmann) which are poorly represented in the paperbacks, a significant number of plays have recently been reprinted and a great many more have been announced...

...The titles alone drive readers away: The Broken Heart, Love's Sacrifice, The Lover's Melancholy, even 'Tis Pity She's a Whore sound far more sentimental than the plays really are...

...The first, a group of five modern plays collected under the title Religious Drama/I (Living Age, $1.45), is already in the bookshops...

...More Plays in Paperbacks By John Unterecker Instructor of English, CCNY Last February, in an article on the paperback publication of drama and drama criticism, I noted that this subject was—for the soft-cover books—almost virgin territory...

...Contemporary dramas are represented by Modern Library's paperback edition of Eugene O'Neill's gloomy, powerful The Iceman Cometh ($.95) ; Bertold Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Good Woman of Setzuan (printed under the title Parables for the Theatre, Evergreen, $1.45) ; and Brendan Behan's enormously vital study of prison life, The Quare Fellow (Evergreen, $1.25...

...The moral, I suppose, is that professional playwrights still write the best plays— even pious ones...

...More are promised...

...For the reader who wants to know the kind of plays Ibsen and Shaw both attacked and used, Stephen S. Stanton's anthology of five of these 19th-century French dramas, Camille and Other Plays (Mermaid Dramabook, $1.45), makes fascinating reading...

...Since then, happily, a considerable invasion has taken place...

...Everyone who knows Ford's work recognizes in it a major dramatist, but far too few people know him...

...With editions of Dryden and Ben Jonson now being distributed and editions of Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Anouilh and a group of French comedies scheduled for January, the play collections especially represent a real opportunity for the reader interested in building a very fine theater library at low cost, and—in this back-to-school season—a real opportunity also for well-wishing friends to provide the freshman drama or English major a gift he will both use and enjoy...

...For these are books designed to be read: printed in large type on good paper...

...Like Brecht he has a very good eye for the theatrically effective device {The Quare Felloiv begins and ends with a ballad which is also used to link the second and third acts), and also like Brecht he is greatly concerned with pointing a moral—in this case the need for prohibiting capital punishment...

...There are probably more editions of Shakespeare than any other author represented in the paperbacks, yet Yale's decision to reissue its fully annotated and carefully edited single-volume set in soft covers is of considerable importance for the Shakespeare scholar...

...Though the play was first produced in 1628, parts of it anticipate modern psychoanalysis...

...Scribe, Augier and Sardou, now half-forgotten and much maligned dramatists, not only created and exploited a new form (the "well-made" play) but managed—for better or for worse—to make it an almost ineradicable element of the modern theater...

...Though W. H. Auden's For the Time Being is more poem than play and though neither James Schevill's The Bloody Tenet nor Dorothy Sayer's The Zeal of Thy House seem quite as eloquent or vivid as their subject matter, it is surprising how very powerful D. H. Lawrence's David is...

...Behan, who is young, Irish, and as yet unrepresented by an American production, is as accurate at catching speech rhythms as O'Neill is not and he has almost as great a gift for characterization...