242
PARTISAN REVIEW
ENGLISH COMEDY REVISITED
THE THREAD OF LAUGHTER. By
Louis Kronenberger. Knopf.
$4.50.
Mr. Kronenberger is two-thirds of the way through his
survey of the English comic drama before he gets out of the eighteenth
century and on to Gilbert and Sullivan, Wilde, Shaw and Maugham.
This emphasis on the earlier writers is fully justified by history and
is
fortunate for Mr. Kronenberger's readers, since Jonson, Etherege, Wych–
erley, Dryden, Congreve, Farquhar, Goldsmith and Sheridan wrote
most of what remains valuable of its kind. Not that the last third of
this book isn't useful too. Mr. Kronenberger's judgment of Wilde seems
right: that he has only the thinnest claim to follow Congreve as a
writer of the comedy of manners, being rather a practitioner of social
melodrama and farce, and that he excels in witty nonsense without
being able to make wit the real point of view or quality of his plays.
If
Mr. Kronenberger seems a little at a loss to handle in a short space
the large phenomenon of Shaw and tries occasionally to do so by
somewhat strained figures of speech, he nevertheless provides the reader
with a good many incidental illuminations of the plays as well as a
generally true judgment that Shaw wrote no really great plays but
that he was a great playwright. Mr. Kronenberger may seem overindul–
gent of Maugham, but this may be the result of his pleasure in knowing
that a genuine comedy of manners can be written in the twentieth
century and the result also of his having been content to end
his
book with a comment on
The Circle
but of having felt, too, that he
must make the concluding paragraph a ringing apostrophe to high
comedy.
There
is
something perfectly simple and dazzling about the world
of the Restoration theater. So much of a piece is it that you can catch
its tone of language and manners in any number of speeches, such as
this one, uttered by Mrs. Sullen in Farquhar'S
The Beaux' Stratagem:
"No, no, child; 'tis a standing maxim in conjugal discipline, that when
a man would enslave his wife, he hurries her into the country; and
when a lady would be arbitrary with her husband, she wheedles her
booby up to town." This is not the greater style of Aristophanes or
Moliere, but, in its way, it is absolutely unique and delightful.
Like the world they exist in the plots of these plays are basically
simple (although sometimes superficially confusing): the young rake
cuckolds the burgher while bedeviling him with a torrent of well-turned
paradoxes; the fop is shown to be one; best of all, the resolute, banter–
ing, worldly-wise young woman brings her errant lover to heel with
