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 the former. I can best indicate the ambivalence I feel toward the book by citing the conflicting reactions I had to it. Reading it was a chore. I found myself struggling through page after page, reading from a sense of duty only, and then coming suddenly on a section which caught my attention, absorbed me, made me think (for a moment) that this was the book I had hoped it would be. Similarly, I found myself convinced that the book would never be useful to me—that what it had to say was either too familiar or too quirky—and then I would hear myself in the classroom using a casual remark of Bentley's to explain a scene in The Children's Hour (a play, incidentally, that The Life of the Drama would scarcely acknowledge). There are a number of reasons for my disappointment in the book as a whole and for the uneasy doubt I have about that disappointment. For a book that is dealing with drama at its most basic, it lingers too long on abstract statements, turns too seldom to look at specific plays up close; when it does so, however, as in two pages on Measure for Measure, it can be very perceptive. For a book that is trying to define the elements of the drama and the genres, it circles endlessly, edging its way toward definitions, losing itself in contradictions. Each chapter is put together from a number of labeled sections, but the blocks do not build comfortably into a total structure; there are edges sticking out in all directions…. Near the end of the book, when the still annoying cloudiness has parted enough to indicate that there are definitions to be found, Bentley comes on apologetically: "I hope the foregoing generalizations are clear, but, if they are, they must also be too simple, too definite, and too schematic to correspond to all the facts." Such a statement (with which I am in sympathy) makes me wonder if what I take for imprecision is policy. For a book that is trying to free drama from the clichés that surround it, to clear away the philosophical debris that has piled up on it over the years, this one is heavily burdened with Bentley's psychology which is really a kind of existential metaphysic and is as narrow and stultifying as any idea is when it gets a stranglehold on the analysis of an art. For a book by Bentley, it is stylistically dull. He appears to have grown gentler over the years, which is to the good I suppose, but I had not realized until now how much his early style was formed by a kind of intelligent malice. Now that it is gone his sentences seem flat and humorless. Although each of these complaints has the hint of a compliment in it, in the end I came away from The Life of the Drama more sad than wise. A closer look at what the book is trying to do and how it does it may indicate why.
The Life of the Drama is really two different books, both of which have relevance to the title. Without denying that plays have meaning, Bentley indicates that he is more interested in the "life" of the drama, in those qualities which make a play exist, which draw and hold an audience, than he is in its paraphrasable meaning. That "life" can be discerned both in the elements that go to make up the drama and in the nature of the experience an audience has in response to the various kinds of drama; for that reason, the book is divided into two sections—one on the "aspects" of a play, the other on the various genres. The two never quite coalesce.
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