This is a salutory book indeed, a refreshing blast against the excesses of 20th century critics who offer us ‘new readings’ of Shakespeare and his contemporaries based on abstract patterns of thought, moral systems, historical analogies … anything in fact but the felt experience of the play in the theatre. ‘Theatre’ is a bad word for many of these critics. They warn us against being ‘taken in’ by the attractiveness of a Hector or a Romeo, threaten that we will ‘only have ourselves to blame’ if we allow ourselves to become intoxicated by Shakespeare’s splendid rhythms so that we ‘cannot see what is going on’. ‘Stay sober’, is the plea actually voiced by one such earnest interpreter. Appeals are constantly made to the superior judgement of the study. Never mind the ‘apparent’ meaning of a scene, such as the traitor scene in Henry V (II ii); if we knew our history better, so one critic tells us, we would realise that the ‘traitors’ were really engaged in trying to restore Mortimer, the rightful heir, whose shadow falls across the entire play, though unfortunately it is ‘not visible from a seat in the theater’, only from ‘the higher vantage point of poetry read in solitude’.

O Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, chastiser of puppets and playwrights, thou art mighty yet! The new puritans are busy indeed in Richard Levin’s pages, castigating lightness, measuring and weighing human behaviour, denigrating women, shrinking from emotional complexity, distrusting the magic of music and poetry. They do not go to the play, the play must come to them and be squeezed into their system. Each has a special patch in the grazing grounds of the English Renaissance Drama Establishment, which are in danger, if this study is to be trusted, of rapidly turning into a dustbowl. There is the ‘occasionalist’ patch where everyone is trying to prove, without benefit of external evidence, that pretty well all Shakespeare’s plays were written for aristocratic or royal occasions and consequently are packed with messages, accessible only to this select company. ‘Close readings’, suggests Levin, depend upon such conspiracies of interest. Or there is the bigger patch described by him as ‘Ideas-of-the-Time Scene’ where critics scour documents like homilies and courtesy books to prove, for instance, that Elizabethan audiences would have unequivocally disapproved of stolen marriages and would probably have thought that Desdemona and Juliet got no more than their deserts. As though, says Levin, Elizabethans, unlike us, could not entertain contradictory ideas on a subject. Some absurd conclusions would flow from such premises: to satisfy that mythical audience, Hermia would have to marry Lysander, and Imogen, poor Imogen, the wretched Cloten. And sure enough a voice from Levin’s Dunciad is heard arguing that Imogen would indeed serve the Elizabethans as another warning of the suffering likely to devolve on undutiful daughters.

A mad world, my masters. But who are these critics, what kind of selection has Levin made in order to represent what he sees as the modern phenomenon of the ‘reading’? The question is rather hard to answer, for he maintains the anonymity of his critics, quoting without documenting specifically though naming all the works he has drawn on in lists at the end of each chapter. A glance at these lists will show that his illustrations come, as he claims, not just from the lunatic fringe, but from the mainstream of academic criticism of English Renaissance drama. Some illustrious names are included and all have at least had the imprimatur of acceptance by academic presses or standard scholarly journals. So we have to take the phenomenon seriously: it reflects widespread habits of mind and presumably teaching methods.

The two largest categories Levin identifies as ‘Thematists’ and ‘Ironists’. Thematists assume that every play is organised round a theme, which usually turns out to be a resounding platitude (see the amusing list on p. 58). Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, The Alchemist, have all been claimed by one critic or another as examples of the ‘What is man?’ theme and the object often seems to be to stake out the biggest general statement, as in the reading which claims: ‘Lear’s story as the story of Man’s life is much more universal than the theme of Everyman‘. The process of homogenisation in this region is truly dispiriting: Othello’s killing of Desdemona is a ‘mere’ dramatic and emotional consequence of his failure to resolve a general human problem: Cleopatra commits suicide because she cannot resolve the discrepency between the World and the Flesh. In this world characters have little interest in their own right.

lronists overlap with the thematists and are alike in their cavalier treatment of dramatic tone and detail, but they specialise in a peculiar kind of modernising, being anti-heroic, anti-romantic, and determined to find ambiguity and inconclusiveness, often in the face of the ‘apparent’ intention of the author. Under their aegis, comedy becomes steadily bleaker and heroic figures are degraded: Juliet is rebuked for the ‘rawness’ of her passion, the Duchess of Malfi paralleled with Julia in the same play, Malcolm with Macbeth, Prospero with Sycorax.

Levin has done a good service by allowing the light of humour and common sense to play on such ‘close readings’ as these. Of course he recognises there can be value in each of the approaches he discusses: it is only when they are codified and substituted for a full and sensitive or even just a sensible reading that the warning bell should sound. When it does sound, we should listen. The trend may be more virulent in America (we learn of some dreadful study aids such as a computerised guide to concepts), but it is not confined to that country. We can all recognise some of the unwritten names, identify Kott as one of those specialising in taking the comic out of comedy, or Lily B. Campbell as an expositor of the ‘slaves of passion’ theme. Names like these are clearly in a different category from the cloud cuckoo land where Falstaff is discovered to be a ‘covert St John’ and it could be, indeed has been objected that Levin’s principle of anonymity, which robs us of context, is unfair to individual critics; the good are tainted by association with the awful. However his point remains; he wishes to identify a trend, and it certainly seems from the range of his illustrations (they proclaim their difference through style) that he has indeed done this. It is a dangerous one, as he says, not just because these approaches encourage a lunatic fringe but because the perpetual abstracting and reluctance to engage with theatrical particularity are liable to blunt and desensitise the imagination.

We should surely all support what he calls his modest proposals for reform, including his invitation to editors to exercise more rigour in selection of academic articles and critics more rigour in reading the ‘close readings’. Writing a close review, as he says, takes as much time and could be more useful than many a new reading, and it is time we moved in this direction. More plain speaking is called for, at the risk of offending against the gentlemanly convention which ordains that each accepts the other’s theme; a convention that Levin believes, no doubt rightly, to be a somewhat cynical laissez-faire doctrine, stemming from professional needs, for promotion and so on. He has taken a bold step to encourage the move from the ‘new reading’ back to the play itself and to our ‘actual dramatic experience, in its unique and concrete particularity’.

Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, Eyre Methuen 285pp. £5.95

The unexpected plural in the title tells us that this book is to be concerned with the whole of Devine’s career, not just with his celebrated association with the Royal Court Theatre. Irving Wardle writes as an admirer, and one of the things he most admires is the immense persistence and staying power which saw Devine through a long struggle to renew the English theatre, beginning in the ’30s when ideas like ‘art theatre’ were alien to English people. Wardle reminds us that so much we take for granted today – subsidies, the company ethic, openness to continental art and modern British life – is largely due to the pioneering influence of Devine.

‘Struggle’ is a word that continually recurs in Wardle’s account of Devine’s complex personality. His was not an easy life, nor can he have been an easy character, either to deal with professionally or as a subject for a biography. Much praise of him is quoted in this study, but as Wardle himself admits, it is sometimes praise of the kind which does not altogether stimulate sympathy or passionate interest. He was a man who in some ways seemed deliberately to repel sympathy: reticent to a degree, bossy, fussy about his theatre in small ways which sometimes irritated; a figure without the glamour which attached to some of his contemporaries, to his one-time colleague Michel Saint-Denis, for instance.

Yet he won faithful support and esteem from some of the most distinguished theatre people of his time. Osborne never failed in appreciation of all that Devine had done for him and for the theatre; friends like Peggy Ashcroft stayed his friend all their lives; Beckett attended his funeral.

Irving Wardle traces the story with these somewhat puzzling discrepancies in mind. He attributes much of the distinctive style of Devine to an unusual, partly Greek family background and an emotionally complicated childhood, with a mother who became unbalanced and a jovially eccentric headmaster uncle whose school he attended. Devine was at one time expected to follow in the footsteps of this uncle, and in a way he did go into schoolmastering, though in the theatre rather than in a boys’ boarding school. He was devoted to the ideas of Michel Saint-Denis and longed throughout his career to establish a school for actors as part of any company he worked with. The Old Vic Theatre School gave him his greatest opportunity, which he seized with passion, evolving training techniques especially for comedy and farce and helping to conduct actors like Joan Plowright through the notorious ‘tunnel’ which made or broke the students in their rigorous course.

Oxford gave him his first push in the direction of theatre. He became President of OUDS at the time when theatrical talent there was strong: Giles Playfair, William Devlin, Hugh Hunt, Terrence Rattigan … No women, OUDS still being a male club, but Peggy Ashcroft was a visiting luminary. Devine even then could attract professional talent: he persuaded John Gielgud to direct a production of Romeo and Juliet in 1932 and never looked back from then on. Gielgud’s vignette of the youthful Devine records the contradictory impressions he made, with his physical unattractiveness – ‘rather ungainly and gross’ – and the strength of his personality – ‘great humour, great charm’. He certainly had much against him: it is hard, as Wardle says, to imagine the spotty, middle-aged looking young man with the harsh strangulated voice as Mercutio, the part he took in Gielgud’s production. Yet he made his way, even as an actor, performing with great réclame in later Royal Court events such as Osborne’s A Patriot for Me, where he astonished as the transvestite Baron von Epp.

After Oxford his career fell into three main phases. First there was his initiation into the professional theatre of the ’30s at the Old Vic and elsewhere, his spell of learning from the dazzling Komisarjevsky, his collaboration with the Motleys, three talented young designers, one of whom he married (this marriage failed, and he later found happiness with another designer who worked with him, Jocelyn Herbert).

Wardle is visited by occasional qualms about the willingness to work ‘within the Philistine Establishment’ which Devine showed at this time and indeed later, when he accepted an official association between the Royal Court and the budding National Theatre which might have meant the take-over of the independent fortress in Sloane Square. That did not happen however: in fact Devine’s shrewdness never was more fruitful, for that move helped to assure the Royal Court of its subsidies. His ability to improvise and compromise where necessary was a strength; it never undermined his radical, pioneering spirit.

He did have, in the second main phase of his career, one excursion into ‘pure’ pioneering, when he worked with Michel Saint-Denis on the Old Vic Centre with its actors’ school, its Young Vic, its devotion to ‘Stanislavsky filtered through a French sensibility’. Wardle gives an interesting account of this too little known period when the English theatre was given a decisive push towards its future by a Frenchman (much anxiety in some quarter lest he get his hands on the National Theatre). The Old Vic experiment ended, but it produced results, as Wardle shows, for the theatre at large and for Devine, who mastered his trade there.

In 1956 his ‘prodigious, hopeful effort’ (Osborne’s good phrase) found fulfilment, when he established the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre and ushered in a new era. He was able then to give openings to Osborne and so many others, help young writers like Edward Bond with opportunities to try out ideas, in Sunday night performances without scenery, and introduce English audiences to European masters, to Brecht and above all to Beckett. This is the best known period in his career, of course; perhaps for that reason Wardle gives a somewhat cursory account of it and there are slips which will need attention in a later edition (The Education Act of 1994, for instance, on p 169, and other errors of this sort). As with any theatrical story, it contains its own drama, some of it painful disappointments over the audience, clashes with the Lord Chamberlain or among the Royal Court personnel themselves, plays that fail. Worn out and ill with heart disease, Devine retired while still in his 50s, considering that he had failed in his aim to create a theatre ‘that would be part of the intellectual life of the country’ and that would ‘change the attitude of the public towards the theatre’.

Wardle’s book makes it clear both why Devine should have thought this and why he was wrong, for, as Osborne says, not only hundreds of writers and actors but the two big subsidiary companies ‘owe him a debt that is incalculable’. This is a study which must be necessary reading for anyone interested in modern English theatre: it would be good to think that it might lead into fuller treatments of a subject which clearly has so much rich interest still to yield up.