Bond, Shaffer, Stoppard, Storey: An International Checklist of Commentary

Abstract

After the regenerating spark of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, the ensuing decade brought four English dramatists into world prominence: Osborne himself, Arnold Wesker, John Arden, and Harold Pinter. When their fortunes waned somewhat in the late sixties, a new cluster ofdramatists -John Russell Taylor dubbed them “the second wave” -coopted a large share of the limelight. Again, four major figures emerged: Edward Bond, Peter Shaffer, Tom Stoppard, and David Storey. The amount of critical attention given to this group, especially Bond and Stoppard, has escalated in recent years to the extent that more than half of the significant studies in print have been published since 1976. Ofthe eighty-plus that exist on Stoppard, for example, nearly fifty were issued in this period; of sixty-five on Bond, thirty-eight. A commendable bibliography that embraces these dramatists, Kimball King's Twenty Modern British Playwrights (New York: Garland, 1977), purports to cover international criticism through 1976, but it is already so out-of-date that it includes only a quarter of the noteworthy studies available by mid-198 I. A new bibliography is obviously needed.