A View from East Anglia

Abstract

TEN YEARS AGO I WROTE AN ARTICLE FOR AMERICAN QUARTERLY DEPLORING the relative disregard of the American theatre, more especially in America. I itemized its neglect by scholarly journals, cultural histories and critical studies. I was scarcely the first to make this point. Year after year, in American Literary Scholarship, Walter Meserve had lamented the lack of attention paid to American drama. That Susan Harris should be echoing this in 1988 shows how little things have changed. There is still no comprehensive history of American drama, no adequate critical analysis of the achievement of many of its writers. Even the most recent literary histories have chosen to marginalize its significance. Meanwhile, a glance at the PMLA bibliography shows its relative disregard by academe. In 1984 Arthur Miller, a major international figure by any standards, rated just seven articles, ten fewer than Frank L. Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz. It is a situation hardly helped, of course, by that curious division of labor by which 'texts' are studied by English departments and performances by theatre departments, a divide that the individual critic is not often invited to cross. It is true that American drama, as a serious literary and performing art, lacks a history extending convincingly back beyond the twentieth century, though Walter Meserve has done much to force a reevaluation even of that assumption. But certainly for the last forty years it has been seen by critics other than Americans as a major, probably the major world drama. The first book on Arthur Miller was published in Britain, the first on Albee in Belgium, the first on Mamet in Britain. The first edition of Susan Glaspell's plays for more than half a century came from a European press while the European