Gilbert and Sullivan. By Charles Hayter. London: Macmillan, 1987. Pp. 186 + illus. £19, £6.50.

Abstract

edited the Shaw-Terry correspondence and an annotated volume of Terry's memoirs. Apart from a book of recollections, little has been published about Edy; a biography is long overdue. The author offers few new insights into Terry's stage work. Unless a role can be connected to her theories on Terry's offstage life, Auerbach skims over it. A potentially useful chronology includes many seemingly peripheral events, but omits most of her roles. Auerbach also constructs elaborate sexist motivations to explain Irving's refusal to stage As You Like It, so Terry could play Rosalind, a most suitable character for her wellhoned skills. But there is evidence that Irving avoided As You Like It because it contained no co-starring role for himself. And when Auerbach suggests that Terry's creative energies were in 'chains at the Lyceum', (p. 247), she unfairly ignores the fact that under Irving's management Terry played a staggering range of roles including an impressive number of Shakespearean ones from Juliet to Lady Macbeth. Auerbach notes that in her 1908 memoirs 'Ellen Terry shapes her memories with a novelist's suggestiveness' (p. 36). For better and worse, the same must be said of Auerbach's book. Wabash College JAMES FISHER