The Modern Form of Drama

Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form
by Lionel Abel
Hill and Wang, 146 pp., $1.45

Heretofore most theorists of high drama have usually offered us this choice: Sophocles or Shakespeare. Critics who all their lives had pondered the Greek and French classical tragedies failed to comprehend the greatness of Shakespeare; and those whose bent was toward his drama, wrongly interpreted the Greeks. The failure on both sides was no accident. For though the divergence of the two forms was there for all to see, yet criteria and standards derived from long study of the one were continually being applied to the other. In particular cases, the critic’s preference could be explained in terms of the European philosophical-literary tradition versus the Anglo-American; or, rationalist versus empiricist; or, idealist versus positivist. The young Georg Lukacs, arguing for Greek tragedy, seriously put forth the hope that critics and public alike might abandon Shakespeare in favor of Corneille and Racine; on the far other side, I. A. Richards applied the term “pseudotragedies,” “near-tragedies,” to the Greeks when compared to the...