In speaking of The Jew of Malta as “farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the humour which spent its last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens …” T. S. Eliot set the pitch for modern Marlovian criticism. We are reminded of Coleridge's remark about a critical dictum by Milton: “Speaking of poetry he says (as in a parenthesis), it is ‘simple, senuous, passionate.’ How awful is the power of words! fearful often in their consequence when merely felt, not understood….” When Eliot called Marlowe's play “farce,” he was saying what, in effect, most previous critics had said—the word can be “understood.” But when he added (as in a parenthesis) that this farce is “terribly serious” in the manner of the “decadent genius” of Dickens, the words can be “merely felt.”

In ordinary daily life we often say one thing and think another: “Do you mind?” when we think “How dare you!,” “You're looking fine” when we think “He is getting old.” Our social behavior is one truth about us, but there is another which our words and actions seldom display directly: if our acquaintances know anything of this, they have usually inferred it from tones of voice, physical reactions, peculiar emphases or hesitations, apparently meaningless mannerisms. Yet, paradoxically, this indirect impression can be the strongest and most lasting, our unspoken nervousness or confidence making a greater effect than considered conversation. And sometimes the indirect impression is one we do not take into account ourselves; perhaps some person arouses a reaction which we have never recognized in ourselves, or a situation makes us more afraid than we are able to admit. But even so, others may observe our changed behavior, for the effect we make individually is both direct and indirect, conscious and subconscious.

For Brook, Lear is a series of intellectual strands which only performance can tie together. Far from being an “unactable play,” he believes its full meaning can only be comprehended existentially—on a stage. He sees it mainly as a play about sight and blindness.

Gloucester, who does not see Edmund's villainy, loses his eyes. Edgar, who does not see his brother's covetousness, loses his freedom. Lear, who does not see the corruption and rancor that see the within his family and state, loses his senses and ultimately his life. Everywhere one looks, one sees only the facades and emblems of a world and, ironically, as characters acquire sight, it enables them to see only into a void.

Fable: A blind man, resolved to die, is led up a steep mountainside by one he takes to be a naked lunatic. The steep mountainside is, in reality, a flat field; the naked lunatic, his son.

The weakness of Edward II, the speaker of these lines, not only deprives him of the fascination exerted by other Marlovian heroes but affects the character of the entire play. None of the dialogue can match the glitter of the greatest speeches in Tamburlaine or Doctor Faustus or even of the remarkable opening speech of The Jew of Malta. The story of such a king inevitably lacks the magnificence radiated by one who seeks to rule the world or command the legions of hell. Yet it is a mistake to underestimate Marlowe's achievement in this play. Only Tamburlaine is more completely an artistic success. There the dramatic possibilities of what we have come to consider the typical Marlovian hero are given their logical fulfillment in a design which is both grand and neat.

The recent death of Ghelderode has awakened renewed interest in his drama. One of the most astounding figures in the contemporary theatre (a theatre full of astounding figures), his work is characterized by such bizarre aspects as fetishism, living dead men, leaps through time, devils, sorcerers, ghosts, grinning buffoons, legendary heroes stubbornly destroying their legend, historical characters denying the facts of their history, philosophical drunkards, and death as a character in farce.

Obsessed by a universe of dark forces in endless ferment, he saw evil and damnation everywhere. Plagued by them, it did not occur to him to attack them with righteous wrath, as did Calderón and Tirso de Molina, the priest-playwrights of the Golden Age of Spanish drama. In Ghelderode's works the devil is alive and active. Moreover, if one probes beneath his anxiety, one finds a certain satisfaction, a feeling of tenderness and amusement.

The original and substantive texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the Quartos of 1604 and 1616) present the play completely without the punctuation of act division or scene enumeration. This is common enough in the play-texts of the period. Indeed it is much the commonest form in plays written for the public theatres. Shakespeare's Henry V and Pericles are without divisions in their quarto texts, but we know that they were written with a five-act structure in mind—the choruses tell us that.

What is exceptional in the textual history of Doctor Faustus is not the lack of division in the original texts; it is rather the reluctance of modern editors to impose an act-structure on the modern texts. This is curious, but it seems possible to discern why the reluctance exists and a survey of the modern editions of Faustus throws some interesting light on critical attitudes to the subject matter of the play.

Eduardo De Filippo bewilders the critics. His comedies raise a number of problems which are not easily disentangled: the relation between the playwright he has become and the actor he has always been; his language, which is neither standard nor dialect; his link to the tradition of the commedia dell'arte; his relation to pirandellismo, surrealism, and neo-realism; the nature of his comedy and the quality of his morality; the burden and function of his Neapolitan settings. One could even ask whether there is a line of development in his work: how can we explain that a true masterpiece like Christmas in the Cupiello Home came fifteen years before the series of plays that fulfilled its promise: Naples’ Millionaires, Oh, These Ghosts!, Filumena, The Voices from Within, My Beloved and My Heart. And finally, what role did World War II play in De Filippo's development?

The world of dark powers which comes from Nothing to fulfill Lear's “darker purpose.” Hecate's world, the world of the absent Queen (Genet's world), the Womb, the sulphurous pit, consumption, stench, madness, the wheel of fire, rage.

To begin the ceremony, Lear speaks of that darker purpose. (With our inadequate terminology, we might call it his Super objective.) He is in good spirits, prepared to bestow bounty and receive love; in a moment he is staring into vacancy. In the divided kingdom, the heart of darkness: “Nothing will come of nothing.” The line recapitulates a cracked fantasy of Power; the rest of the play proceeds from it. For us it was a datum: ground level. Cordelia says “Nothing“—and history is annihilated. Out of the appearance of Absolute Form, hallucination—a dark voyage through the anarchic id. Why did she say nothing? Later, the words of her charity, the most forgiving words of all, tell what weighed down her ponderous tongue: “No cause, no cause.”

I am of the opinion that exaggerated estimates of an author often work against a continuing interest in him; thus I cannot but be sympathetic to certain of the criticisms M. Auréliu Weiss has made of Michel de Ghelderode. I want people to be interested in Ghelderode and in his plays; and I should like their interest to be lasting. So I shall not dispute M. Weiss's pejorative judgments of some of the dramatist's lesser works: Le Soleil Se Couche, La Mori du Docteur Faust, Don Juan, Sortie de L'Acteur, and Pantagleize, all of which have been overrated by Ghelderode's admirers. It is true to say, as M. Weiss does, that in these plays, as in others by the Belgian playwright, there are precious bits along with “capricious inventions, exaggerations, absurdities … platitudinous meditations, extravagances, esoteric obscurities.”

Today every actor understands what is meant by “subtext.” But it is a new word. It is not listed in The New English Dictionary or its Supplement of 1939. It comes from the Moscow Art Theatre and is associated with the “Method.” When we use the word, we are usually talking about twentieth century acting, an art distinguished by its conscious attempt to portray the subconscious nature of man, its “psychological” truth. For Stanislavsky, “subtext” was:

He used the word as a means of talking about the “inner truth” of a play, its “inner action,” “inner images,” “inner motives,” “inner line,” “inner tempo.” And all these concepts were particularly applicable to the revolutionary plays of Chekhov.

Doctor Faustus tends to come apart in paraphrase. It can be turned into a fable about a Modern Man who seeks to break out of Medieval limitations. On the other hand, when one retells the story in religious terms, it tends to come out as though it were Marlowe's source, The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. The truth is that the play is irreducibly dramatic. Marlowe dramatizes blasphemy, but not with the single perspective of a religious point of view: he dramatizes blasphemy as heroic endeavor. The play is an expression of the Reformation; it is profoundly shaped by sixteenth-century religious thought and ritual. But in presenting a search for magical dominion, Marlowe makes blasphemy a Promethean enterprise, heroic and tragic, an expression of the Renaissance.

In 1963, Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory in Opole, Poland— an industrial town of 50,000 some sixty miles from Auschwitz— produced Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Not one word was changed in the script, but the text was reordered into a “montage,” as Grotowski calls it, drawing on all the Quartos and rearranging the sequence of scenes, creating new ones and eliminating some others. We are printing the program notes to this production, including the sequence of scenes as Grotowski conceived them,. Although the play was performed in Polish, Grotowski wrote the program in French. The Theatre Laboratory is small, seating only sixty, and productions are mounted only when they are ready. For Faustus the long, low theatre room—about forty by fifteen feet—was painted black, and the set consisted of two long tables running the length of the room and one smaller table at one end of the room. In a future issue, we shall have an article about the Theatre Laboratory's work and an interview with Grotowski by Eugenia Barba, who spent some months in Poland with Grotowski's company. We would like to thank Mr. Barba for sending us the program and photographs printed below. —The Editor

Beneath a hot roof, on an oppressive summer's day, in a roasting room, Brick and Margaret Pollitt face each other. Brick, heated and hardening in this oven-like bedroom, turns his thoughts toward the liquor cabinet. Margaret, wanting a child by her husband (“in the oven,” as father-in-law Big Daddy would say), and tense (as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof) because of enforced continence, turns her thoughts toward the bed.

Indeed, the two most prominent scenic elements of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—elements which fulfill the needs both of the world on stage and the box office in the lobby—are a liquor cabinet and a bed. The former is a “monument,” and the latter is “slightly raked to make figures on it seen more easily….”

We enter the theatre. There is no curtain. A raked stage extends well beyond the formal proscenium arch, reaching in almost desperate appeal to the potential responsiveness of the audience. We see what appears to be an enormous, high-beamed gallery, a candle chandelier hanging over a floor of heavy oak boards, supporting only the barest of furnishings, surrounded on three sides by towering, dark, red-brick walls, with a delicately curtained archway breaking the upstage center wall. This is the only suggestion of mobility in the entire set. All else is weighted, durable, lived-in, lending the atmosphere a peculiar, autumnally-colored sense of permanence. This room, we feel, is definitely in a theatre, but just as surely it has known life, an existence away from us, somewhere remote, in a past that we had comfortably connected only with the pleasing unreality of history. Like most English rooms, it seems to be weathered by a stern assumption that winter belongs inside as much as out.