272 Comparative Drama one with an observation about its limitations. If Adamson does not quite replace the readings of Bradley and Leavis, she at least indicates the groundwork upon which such a replacement must be built. Her study abounds in insights. It is good to be reminded, for example, that Shake speare’s imagination here must have been fired primarily by the plight of a man whose very proficiency, in rhetoric as in other things, ultimately led him into trouble. It is valuable to be made to see that Othello’s strategy in winning Desdemona anticipates strikingly the strategy that Iago subsequently uses to undo him, and it is very valuable to be re minded that all the characters in this play depend for an image of themselves on what they see in the eyes of others. Whatever else Shake speare did, Adamson would have us believe, he held the mirror up to nature and again and again made available to us a richer understanding of human motives and responses. The last two chapters alone would justify the study. In the first of these Desdemona escapes her “canoniza tion,” Bianca gets her due as a character who demonstrates—something that Emilia and Desdemona never quite learn—the need to be “circum stanced,” or the art of putting up with things as they are; and Emilia perhaps more than anyone else in the play exhibits the lust all the principals share for moral certainty and justice, a positive need to view things in terms of black and white that drives them to destruction as they pursue their individual images of goodness. Adamson’s last chapter, devoted to the final scene, brings us full circle. There she shows an Othello, his self all but disintegrated, vainly resorting to his rhetorical skill of the first act in order to hold himself together long enough to salvage some fragment of relief for a psyche wounded beyond endurance. This is not quite the image of a monstrous egotism brought to its reckoning; but it is a fair picture of the way we ourselves, in our lesser lives, attempt to shield ourselves from the full recognition of disaster by keeping it out of sight and, as much as may be, out of mind. “It was not Iago who brought Othello to commit murder and suicide,” Adamson declares; “it was Othello’s own need for moral and emotional finality, moral and emotional certainty.” The play works for us, she implies, in proportion as we “prove” this action in the life about us and in ourselves. Be that as it may, she has enhanced our view of Othello by reducing him to a more credible humanity, and she has intensified vastly our sense of his pain by requiring us to feel a degree of it on our own pulses. J. A. BRYANT, JR. University of Kentucky Ibsen and the Theatre. Ed. by Errol Durbach. New York and London: New York University Press, 1980.140 pp. + Index. $25.00 cloth. In size, scope, and general quality this collection of essays is com parable to the Norwegian Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen series (1966, 1971, 1977)—not surprisingly, since some of the same authors Reviews 273 appear in both. All are worthwhile volumes, and not just because they represent—almost by definition—the best in current Ibsen studies. Ibsen and the Theatre consists of eight of the papers given at the sesquicentennial Ibsen conference at the University of British Columbia in Van couver, B. C., in May 1978, and Errol Durbach’s Introduction. The chief distinctions of the volume are the contributions by Inga-Stina Ewbank and Janet Suzman, and its outrageous price. Its title is misleading, since really only two of the essays (Suzman’s and Lise-Lone and Frederick Marker’s) are about “Ibsen and the Theatre.” Stage concerns aren’t prominent even in Durbach’s Introduc tion. There is nothing wrong with putting together a volume of miscel laneous essays on an author, but there is something a little wrong with a collective title that implies that the essays are all on the same general topic. The “eclecticism” of the collection, which the editor admits to, is more...