Dr. Sarup Singh makes it clear right from the preface to his book that in the plays he has chosen to discuss, his primary concern will lie not with structure or language or detail of craft. He says: ‘My sub-ject is the ‘life’ that the play¬wrights treat of—certain basic human relationships as deter¬mined or influenced by the problems of larger social rela¬tions. I see the situations in these plays more or less as I would see similar situations in real life’. Literature, it is said, is at one remove from life, because in it we encounter life as filtered through the eyes of the author. Literary criticism has, as a rule, been at a further remove from life by concerning itself most often with methods of expression and literary craft. Critics are usually embarras¬sed to discuss exclusively the ideas of an author for fear either of appropriating to themselves the function of the philosopher or social historian or of concerning themselves too long with a subject not specifically aesthetic. Dr. Sarup Singh has none of these fears. In discussing in ideational and moral terms the life of the times, he has pre¬sented the preoccupations of Shakespeare and Restoration Comedy with an immediacy that brings home to us how very alive all the issues of those ages are even today.
March-April 1985, volume 9, No 3/4