SHAKESPEARE'S GAME

What the world doesn't need: another set of jargon phrases to use in diagramming the life out of Shakespeare's plays. Gibson (Two for the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker) fashioned his particular vocabulary for a graduate seminar in play-wrighting, and perhaps in that context there was some educational benefit in describing Shakespearean scenes and overall dramatic structure in terms of "levels," "moves," "submoves," "objects," "barriers," "master premises," "surrogates," "third-act pivots," or "plunges" (the last two really just new tags for what every high-schooler learns as "climax" and "denouement"). For the general reader, however, as Gibson dips in and out of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, The Tempest, and many others, the effect is unoriginal at best—parallels between Lear and Gloucester, what keeps Hamlet from killing Claudius, etc.—and often infuriatingly cloddish, as with Midsummer's Night Dream: "The ass is 'translated' from the third level, where the move is the artisans' and its object is on the first. . . . On the fourth level, Oberon is the move and Titania the object." Only one sequence, in which Gibson uses his system in a comparison of the 1603 and 1604 version of Hamlet, offers anything remotely fresh and illuminating to scholar or playgoer. For the rest, we'll have to applaud playwright Gibson's assurance that this is his "first and last book as a critic.