Paul Vincent Carroll can be seen in perspective as a minor playwright who made two or three highly important contributions to modern drama in English. Several of his plays have never been published, but enough of them are available to form a fair picture of his achievement. There are notable strengths as well as glaring faults. Robert Hogan, Carroll's occasional friend and critic, has aptly described his ambivalence as a thinker and stylist: "He has been a satirist attracted to mysticism and a realist attracted to fantasy. He has been an outspoken critic of photographic realism whose best known plays have been realistic and whose unrealistic experiments have been halfhearted. He has a lyric impulse which he has half smothered by reading the Augustans and a penchant for comic chaos which he has tempered by studying the painstaking plot structure of Ibsen and T. C. Murray." Despite this...