Jessup, who is an active stage director as well as a poet, contends that Fry (1907-2005) stands squarely in the mainstream of poetic drama that stretches from Shakespeare to Beckett, that the
genre found its apotheosis in Marlow's Doctor Faustus, and that the essence of poetic drama is a belief in sacramental time in which now is always. Fry's plays, therefore, can be judged by how
close they come to the ideal epitomized by Faustus, or how far short they fall. Among his topics are the history of poetic drama and Fry, the heretic and the churchman, Fry's Moses and the
Bible's Moses, his last play, style in earlier and later plays, and Fry and Eliot as the spark and the stone. Annotation 穢2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
