As a critic Bentley has virtues usually characteristic of fiction
writers: he is exhilarating, inventive, witty; he is extremely
secure both in style and sentiment; above all, he knows how to keep
the scholarly gadgetry geared to a pleasing pace. His popularity,
no doubt, is as much due to these graces as to what he actually
says. The book here- his first non-reviewing work in some years,
and an outgrowth of his recent Harvard lectures - is rather
academic in format: a discussion of the ingredients and the kinds
of drama known to us from the ancients to the moderns. It presents
Bentley surprisingly in a somewhat Olympian mood, given to a
reconciliation of all the contrary pulls of theatrical history,
with little or no extreme stances anywhere. He does opt, as always,
for ideas, but as defined now - the idea becoming the action, etc.
Very few so-called anti-intellectual playwrights could take
umbrage. He has good (and useful) things to say of melodrama and
farce though considering them second-rate siblings to tragedy and
comedy. He believes plot, dialogue, character, thought and
enactment to be of equal (or almost equal) importance. For him the
play presents a vision of life, and thus "statements" are
inescapable, whether they be implicit (as Leavis would have it) or
explicit (like the Marxists). He ranges smartly from Aristotle and
Shakespeare to the Spanish and German classics, and Brecht, Ibsen,
Shaw; he has clever asides from social psychology and the
newspapers. Though he displays his dazzling effects by foregoing
others - e.g., in-depth analyses - his book promises to be in
demand for many, many years. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Eric Bentley's radical new look at the grammar of theatre...is a
work of exceptional virtue... The book justifies its title by being
precisely about the ways in which life manifests itself in the
theatre...This is a book to be read again and again." - Frank
Kermode, The New York Review of Books
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