Dialogue in American Drama by Ruby Cohn

Abstract

338 Comparative Drama could have any functional bearing on its development of the life-as-adream theme? Chapman, of course, would lay the responsibility for any dullness or misunderstanding directly on the blockish heads of his audience; and Cope, who so admires Chapman, may share something of his impatience with readers who find themselves merely baffled by the intellectual de­ mands of his work. In any case, this book will demand not only strenu­ ous and thoughtful attention, but more assent than it may receive if it is actually to provide, as he hopes, the “first sketch” of an idea that will be completed “into a true history” by others (p. 245). But it will remain an important book—a tool to think with (much as Cope himself uses Ortega, Artaud, and Frye to “shape the tools” for his own thinking) as well as a provocative guide to a wide range of relevant material for any­ one who is seriously interested in the “idea of the theater” as it flourished in the Renaissance. I should add that it is an extremely handsome book, designed and printed in a style that does credit to its ambitious treatment of its subject. ROBERT C. JONES The Ohio State University Ruby Cohn. Dialogue in American Drama. Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1971. Pp. 340. $9.50. “Dialogue in American Drama” sounds like the title of a dissertation suggested by a member of that hard-core cadre of professors whose chief fear in life is that one of their students will write something that they will be unable to understand. The whole book reads like one of these minor league dissertations reworked in slapdash style for publication so that the writer will not perish. Professor Cohn has written a book on how it is said in American drama instead of on what is said and why. How something is said is of secondary importance. Because literature, and particularly dramatic liter­ ature, is a vehicle for the imaginative transmission of ideas, the main concern of a sensible critic should be the quality of those ideas. An examination of style is necessarily auxiliary to an analysis of the ideas but should never be attempted as an end in itself. Criticism that analyzes the wiring instead of the effect of the floodlights reduces literature to the level of a chess game, where tactics controls strategy. Professor Cohn devotes separate chapters to dialogue in the works of O’Neill, Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Albee. These chapters are entitled, respectively, “The Wet Sponge of Eugene O’Neill,” “The Articu­ late Victims of Arthur Miller,” “The Garrulous Grotesques of Tennessee Williams,” and “The Verbal Murders of Edward Albee.” These titles themselves indicate a woeful poverty of verbal imagery and a dithering confusion as to the function of critical language. They are ominous indi­ cations of what is to come in the chapters themselves. In addition, Professor Cohn has two chapters, comprising well over half the book, Reviews 339 entitled “Less than Novel” and “Poets at Play.” These deal with plays written by novelists (Baldwin, Barnes, Bellow, Dos Passos, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Harris, Hawkes, Hemingway, Hughes, Stein, Wilder, and Wolfe) and by poets (Cummings, Eberhart, Ferlinghetti, Frost, Good­ man, Jeffers, Leroi Jones, Koch, Lowell, MacLeish, Nemerov, Rochelle Owens, Rexroth, Schevill, Stevens, and William Carlos Williams). Profes­ sor Cohn correctly points out that novelists and poets usually fall flat on their faces when they try to write plays since they know nothing about the theatre; but she fails to explain why she felt impelled to grind out 185 pages in which this point is demonstrated repetitively with no other discernible purpose than that of reducing the compulsive reader to a state of delirium tedii. When she does come up against an able playwright, as in the case of Thornton Wilder and Kenneth Koch, Professor Cohn is at great pains to misinterpret them totally with a view to demonstrating that they too cannot write drama. Koch, we are informed, is a satirist but he has limited targets, and these limited targets, the mockery of which make Koch an inadequate satirist, are then listed: “history, legend, patriotic and contemporary clichés.” One is led to suspect...