The Italian Shakespearians by Marvin Carlson

Abstract

86Comparative Drama The cross-referencing necessary to study a dramatic subject seems inevitable in a volume of this sort, but the privileging of organization by county or site over a broader chronology is a harder choice to defend in terms of convenience for most users. To be sure, medieval drama is undeniably regional in character, and it is to reflect this important reality that Lancashire has chosen a scheme of organization not employed in any reference work since Chambers. In Appendix IV, moreover, he does give us a useful chronological list of salient dates and entry numbers that provides a year-by-year guide to dramatic activity in the context of British history and European drama. It should further be noted that the use of bold face and italic typeface to highlight the more significant numbers helps give a sense of priorities to the various numbering systems . A little practice will convince most users that the numbering systems are not as difficult as I may have suggested. What does this volume tell us that is new about the development of English drama? The answers to that question are chiefly still to come, for that is the point of providing an instrument of research. Even at the start, however, one can see important implications. For one thing the attention paid heretofore to the plays catalogued in Chambers and Harbage-Schoenbaum and the 5TC has produced an undue emphasis on extant morality drama. We need to be aware that many dramatic entertainments in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not moral plays but scriptural drama, folk plays, and the like. Earlier, Roman influence on church and popular drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be seen to be greater than Chambers was willing to allow, not least of all in the pattern of dispersion among England's various urban centers that persisted until the centralizing influence of London and the universities made itself felt in the early Tudor era. Lancashire's work, together with the several volumes of the REED project, gives continuing support to the large-scale revision of early dramatic history we have seen in the last twenty years, beginning with the important correction given to the Whig-Liberal Darwinian assumptions of Karl Young, John Matthews Manly, and other historians of their era. Much remains to be done, and Lancashire is to be thanked for providing the topography or map that we need to plan and carry out our next moves. DAVID BEVINGTON University of Chicago Marvin Carlson. The Italian Shakespearians. Washington, D. C: Folger Books, 1986. Pp. 224. $28.50. Marvin Carlson's The Italian Shakespearians is one of those rare books that cross generic boundaries and provide unexpected pleasures to a variety of readers of markedly different interests. As a history it gives us a fair and thorough appraisal of one of the most curious phenomena of the nineteenth-century English and American theatre: the craze for beholding Italian actors (Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi) playing Shakespeare in Italian in the midst of what we now call a "pick-up company" of Eng- Reviews87 lish-speaking actors. The historian with interest in nineteenth-century theatre will be amply rewarded though never buried under the mountainous boredom of needless detail and repetitive quotations and footnotes of myopic scholarship. The reader who responds to the call of cultural anthropology will be as generously rewarded as the theatre historian, for this book not only addresses the difference between "things" Italian and "the ways" of the English or "northern peoples," but also reveals an even more important situation: the cultural passage from a neo-classic sensibility to that of the romantics. The importance of the three Italians who are the subject of Carlson's book lies precisely in their theatrical nationality. The neoclassical hold upon Italy was at once aesthetic and political, and when the Italians broke the shackles of French domination they did so with fervor that was more definite than that of the English who liked to think of themselves as independent of the French fashion. One is made keenly aware of the significance of this revolution in the first chapter of Carlson's book. I have seen the...