The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times, Fourth Edition [Paperback]

First published in 1946,The Playwright as Thinkeris a classic work of drama criticism that helped create the intellectual environment in which serious American theater would thrive in the second half of the twentieth century. At the time of publishing, most drama critics believed dramatic art deserved no intellectual status; Eric Bentley set out to prove them wrong. Focusing on the canonic playwrights Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Sartre, and Brecht, Bentley viewed the playwright as thinker, and his survey of over 150 years of dramatic art provided, in essence, an intellectual history of Europe. This edition not only contains the original, long-suppressed foreword, in which Bentley lambastes the climate of Broadway at the time, but also the author's 1987 afterword.
 

A definitive work by one of the greatest drama critics.

Critic, scholar, translator, and playwright, Eric Bentley has been Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. He served as drama critic of theNew Republicand was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1997-98. His most widely read books areThinking about the Playwright,Bentley on Brecht, andThe Kleist Variations.

 

Richard Gilman (1923-2006) was one of the leading drama and literary critics of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a professor at the Yale School of Drama for thirty-one years and the author of five books of criticism and a memoir.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Richard Gilman
Foreword
1. The Two Traditions of Modern Drama
2. Tragedy in Modern Dress
3. Tragedy in Fancy Dress
4. Wagner and Ibsen: A Contrast
5. Bernard Shaw
6. Varieties of Comic Experience
7. August Strindberg
8. From Strindberg to Jean-Paul Sartre
9. From Strindberg to Bertolt Brecht
10. Broadway-and the Alternative
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