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 occasion for some thoughts on Bentley's work in recent years. Such an assessment will not do justice to what Bentley wrote before 1956, nor will it touch on a very interesting venture of his into theatre theory, The Life of the Drama (1964). However, the trajectory of a major critic during a dozen years is not only fascinating on its ...

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...

[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 George, and Lawrence. He shows that they left an ambiguous cultural heritage to the world and explains why they could be instructive and inspiring to democrats and why, at the same time, the fascists could exploit them for their own ends. What unites all the heroic vitalists is a repudiation of the ideals of democracy because of the degradi...

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, has been practical as well as critical, passionate as well as judicial. There is hardly an advance in modern drama that he has not illuminated and promoted, hardly a fault that he has not detected and exposed. It follows that no one is better qualified to take the broadest possible view of the drama in our times; no one is more entitled to a...

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 quantities of nonsense and vapor. The Foreword is a good start in itself, and the subjects presented thereafter are such as the two traditions that modern drama must cope with: tragedy in modern dress; tragedy in fancy dress; Wagner and Ibsen: a contrast; Bernard Shaw; varieties of comic experience; August Strindberg; from Strindberg to Jean-Paul ...

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 of the nineteenth century between humanitarian ideals and intellectual developments, so that when eventually the Western world found itself confronted with a resurgence of political despotism, the intellectuals and the artists seemed to be, if not on the side of despotism, at least indifferent to it…. Having been struck by the fact that Car...

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 many things but not that. Theatre of Commitment again does nothing to prepare you for the nervously sceptical essays within. And so again in the case of this new collection. Theatre of War consists of a selection of substantial pieces written over the past 20 years, arranged under three headings so as to imply a governing pattern. Mr Bentley divides the materi...

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 pulling them together into a single character. Perhaps he has oversimplified. Perhaps he has been too arbitrary in denying Mr. Shaw most of his seeming inconsistencies and pointing out what has always been radiantly consistent about his rebel's work. Even so, all of us (including Mr. Shaw) stand in Mr. Bentley's debt. (p. 22) Mr. Bentl...

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 been there. He has seen and felt. He has experienced the theatre. For this reader he has a right to be dogmatic, such is his authority. Those who have read his former magazine articles and books, especially "The Playwright as Thinker," will remember with what gusto and flailing he tore into many of the idols we had shied arou...

[Followers] of Mr. Bentley's career will have guessed already from the somewhat ponderous title of his new volume ["What Is Theatre?"] that they are familiar with most of what it contains. Of the 104 journalistic articles which comprise its contents, 93 have appeared between hard covers before. All but 2 of the 93 are reprinted for the second time from the New Republic. Mr. Bentley was, of course, a very good journalist, and his occasional pieces are shrewd and incisive. They have lost ...

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 Hero-Worship]. He further confesses that the rather lacklustre title had led him to expect the sifted tailings of some academic mine. Certainly he was not prepared for thought like electricity in motion and wholly different from the static glow of St. Elmo's fire. Nor did he anticipate analysis and interpretation at once intelligently im...