A History of Scandinavian Theatre.

Schoolfield, George C.

Beyond question, Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker's latest book will get very heavy use in surveys of world drama and as a reference source for students and teachers of Ibsen, Strindberg, and even Ingmar Bergman (as a man of the theatre). The illustrations (seventy-four of them) are excellent and helpful. One of the great strengths of the Markers is their ability to bring important stagings of major Scandinavian plays to life, a not inconsiderable accomplishment. Performances and their mechanisms are almost as hard to suggest cogently in scholarly prose as are, say, their musical opposite numbers.

As the Markers tell in their preface, the book was conceived in response to an invitation by the Cambridge University Press to "revise and reissue" The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History, published by Basil Blackwell in 1975 as part of the very useful series Drama and Theatre Studies. They realized that "an entirely new book" was necessary. The first five chapters of the 1975 version have been "carefully revised to take advantage of the wealth of new research . . . published in the Scandinavian languages since the early 1970s," while a "subsequent, much longer section" consists of six new chapters, with the general heading "Pioneers of Modern and Post-Modern Theatre." Thus the chapter on "Denmark's Golden Age" has expanded to become "The Romantic Theatre and Its Aftermath" in 1996, the finale of the first part. Ibsen has been extensively redone (chapter 6), a whole new chapter on the Danish director William Bloch and his fellows has been added (chapter 7), and "The Strindberg Challenge" is examined in its demand for new ways of staging (chapter 8). Chapters 9 through 11 - on the modernist revolt, tradition and experiment since 1945, and "the plurality, of modern theatre" - go far beyond what the Markers had sketched out at the century's three-quarter point; they do especially good service as they map the enormous changes in the concept and venue of theatre that have flourished in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden since the 1960s.

Some aspects, large and small, of the new book give pause. As in 1975, the "Scandinavian Theatre" title is misleading. The excuse that "as intrinsically interesting as they are, the theatres of Finland and Iceland must of necessity fall outside the range of the present inquiry" is disingenuous. Swedish-language theatre in Finland is linguistically accessible to the Markers, and its omission puzzles. The passing reference to the "Latin school plays performed by students at the newly founded university in Abo" ignores the fact that the most important of these plays were written in Swedish by a young man from Vastergotland, Jacob Chronander: in particular, his Surge eller Flijt- och oflijtighetz Skode Spegel (1647) is a comedy of dramatic merit and large sociological content. The closing of the door on Swedish Finland means too that the greatest historical drama in Swedish before Strindberg, J. J. Wecksell's Daniel Hjort (1862), is not mentioned; neither are the plays of Runar Schildt (once much performed in Sweden) and the expressionist and political drama of Hagar Olsson. As for Finnish-language theatre, it is sad to think that the dramas of Kivi, Minna Canth, Mafia Jotuni, and Paavo Haavikko (and an unusually vigorous theatrical culture) have been cast into limbo, as has the whole small but telling corpus of Icelandic drama. (Here, anglophone readers can find some consolation in the translated anthologies edited by Einar Haugen in 1967 and Sigurour A. Magnusson in 1973.) One wonders: why did not the authors, or their press, recruit outside experts for supplementary chapters, so that the book would live up to its name? It has been accepted for quite a long time that the North is a single cultural entity.

Some strange little errors turn up in the text itself, despite the careful revision. Christian II of Denmark (1481-1559) was not precisely "the medieval king." The theatre of Karl Theodor von der Pfalz is correctly placed at Schwetzingen in 1975 but is moved to a nonexistent "Scherzingen" in 1996. The philosopher Hegel has the same wrong initials ("F. G.") in 1996 as in 1975. Much more seriously, the great C.J.L. Almqvist - whose novels Amorina and Drottningens juvelsmycke were turned into plays by Alf Sjoberg in the 1950s - is called "the hitherto un-noticed nineteenth-century dramatist" in 1975 and then, twenty-one years later, "the obscure nineteenth-century dramatist."

The bibliography is not as generous as it might have been toward English-language works, even though the history is plainly aimed at an anglophone audience. For example, where are Walter Johnson's book on Strindberg's historical plays (1963), Carla Waal's important article on William Bloch's Wild Duck in the Educational Theater Journal (1978), the English translation of Olof Lagercrantz's Strindberg biography (1980), Harry Carlson's Strindberg book (1982), and Sven Rossel's collection of essays on Holberg (1994) by various hands? Mara Wade's major study of Danish baroque theatre probably appeared too late to catch the Markers' attention, but it was preceded by her several pioneering articles.

George C. Schoolfield Yale University