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Reviews77 Those readers who come for the first time to Shakespeare will find much in the early chapters to interest them. This is a work of synthesis, generously paying tribute to the collaborative nature of theater studies. Readers familiar with the work of E. K. Chambers and Muriel Bradbrook will be rewarded by Bevington's self-effacing and thorough review of the fine-tuning of critical argument during the last twenty years. Devotees of Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber may not wish to exchange their terms of analysis for those of anthropology. To me terms such as 'liminality' and 'rites of passage' rest more lightly on the comedies than the tragedies. Occasionally the author's assumptions about gesture and staging fall short of the book's admirable insistence upon Shakespeare's mastery of complex double perspective. We can recover something about the heroine's gesture from Ulysses' description of Cressida in IV.v, or the movement of an otherworldly creature from descriptions of the ghost in Hamlet. Yet Leontes' description of Hermione walking in the garden with Polixines would be followed in gesture by an actress at her peril! Whether or not one stumbles at 'liminality,' Bevington's interpretation of the doors of entrance and exit is stimulating; he argues that Shakespeare uses stage doors to emphasize the moments of passage from one physical or psychological state to another; here anthropology jumps boundaries and provides modern translation. The approach is not entirely new but it is used here by a scholar who is flexible enough to place his historical knowledge at the service of modern productions. MARIE AXTON University of Cambridge Emanuele Licastro. Ugo Betti: An Introduction. Jefferson, N. C: McFarland , 1985. Pp. xiv + 174. $18.95. Ugo Betti (1892-1953) is considered the most important Italian dramatist of the generation immediately after Luigi Pirandello. Although at times associated with Existentialism, his work treats "the legacy of Cain"—that tendency as part of "the children of men" rather than "the sons of God" (Genesis 6.2) for individuals to seek justification in humanly ordained structures and to become victim repeatedly of human nature and presumption. Often, as in classical drama, the failures involve misperceptions of eternal or divine justice, and, in showing man's limited understanding, Betti attacks as well the limits of man's methods of inquiry. In personal terms, the attacks involve man's deceptions about himself, and, in dramatic terms, they assume a questioning of convention and style. Within a single play, Betti may move from naturalism to symbolism to allegory to demonstrate the inability of any single approach to achieve truth. Still, whatever their affinities with classical drama, Betti's plays lean toward Christian resolutions—compassion for one's fellow man or accession to supernatural or seemingly superhuman agents. Complaining that "there is never any feeling of flesh and blood," American critics have called the result "philosophical melodrama" and dismissed the plays as "intellectual exercises rather than pieces for the living stage." Of the nearly thirty plays, ten are available in English translation, and only The Gambler, Crime on Goat Island, and The Queen and the Rebels 78Comparative Drama have seen Broadway productions. None has been successful. In England and Europe where a tolerance for "dramas of ideas" is greater, Betti's work has found strong defenders and serious audiences, and his successes have been more numerous. Seven plays dominate arguments for Betti's importance. Four—Landslide , Corruption in the Palace of Justice, The Inquiry, and The Gambler —are plays whose official inquests explore difficulties in assigning to the "legatees" of Cain clear moral and ethical responsibility. They propose with John the Apostle that "everyone who hates his brother is a murderer" (7. John 3.15), and since hatred appears endemic to "the children of men," guilt for a disaster like that which centers Landslide widens to include the "monstrous machinery" of a society that is purportedly a "reparation" for Cain's original crime (Genesis 4.17). The fitness to judge of those who are at times given responsibility for judgment becomes the concern of Corruption in the Palace of Justice, and by using a different style in each of its three acts and never...
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