Critical Essay by Leonard Bacon
A young man has arrived. The reviewer shamelessly admits that he has been astonished, excited, charmed, and occasionally puzzled by this brilliant book [A Century of H...
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Critical Essay by Ralph G. Allen
[Followers] of Mr. Bentley's career will have guessed already from the somewhat ponderous title of his new volume ["What Is Theatre?"] that they ...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Eric Bentley's books tend to go by robustly confident titles which somehow get drowned in the text. What Is Theatre? The book tells you a good m...
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Critical Essay by Sidney Hook
[In A Century of Hero-Worship] Mr. Bentley analyzes the theme of historical and aesthetic hero-worship in the works of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Wagner, Shaw, Spengler, Stefan...
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Critical Essay by Nicola Chiaromonte
Mr. Bentley has tried to deal with a very important subject [in "A Century of Hero-Worship"]: the undeniable split that took place toward the middle...
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Critical Essay by Stark Young
Within so notable a range of subjects The Playwright as Thinker manages to say a surprising lot, and amid so much knowledge, scope and even prophecy, to omit vast quanti...
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Critical Essay by John Mason Brown
As no one (including Mr. Shaw) has managed to do before him, Mr. Bentley has succeeded [in "Bernard Shaw"] in collecting all the various Shaws and pul...
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Critical Essay by Paul Green
Eric Bentley is one of the most penetrating and dogmatic critics writing on drama and the theatre today. And by dogmatic I mean no derogation at all. For he knows. He has...
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Critical Essay by John Gassner
It has been no secret for nearly two decades that Eric Bentley is one of America's most incisive writers on the theater. His engagement to the theater, moreover,...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Weales
I cannot say when I have been more provoked by a book than I was by The Life of the Drama. In both senses—I found it provoking and provocative, but more often t...
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Critical Essay by Darko Suvin
The latest book by Eric Bentley, The Theatre of Commitment, a collection of his essays on drama and theatre covering the period from 1956 to 1966, provides a convenient ...
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Here’s a few brief observations about Julia Roberts, now starring on Broadway in Richard Greenberg’s extremely slight 1997 Three Days of Rain.
What Antonin Artaud has described as a &#...
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Here’s a few brief observations about Julia Roberts, now starring on Broadway in Richard Greenberg’s extremely slight 1997 Three Days of Rain.
What Antonin Artaud has described as a &...
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The mortal danger of all the political theater I’ve seen this season is whether it preaches pointlessly to the choir—or takes an imaginative leap to exist in its own dynamic right.
All...
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The mortal danger of all the political theater I’ve seen this season is whether it preaches pointlessly to the choir—or takes an imaginative leap to exist in its own dynamic right.
Al...
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Critical Essay by Leonard Bacon
The Thing About Julia; A Bomb Explodes at Studio 54
