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Frederick J. Marker, Lise-Lone Marker. A History of Scandinavian Theatre. New York. Cambridge University Press. 1996. xv + 384 pages, ill. $59.95/45. ISBN 0-521-39237-3.
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,...