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1968 BOOK REVIEWS 217 The point of any myth is to provide a known element as a starting point and preserve us from the vacuum of absolute novelty. The expression "grin and bear it" says all. It is grinning that enables us to bear it. In this work, however, Bentley's quotes are less impressive than the whole. Despite the informal, almost spontaneous style, it is evident that Bentley has meditated for years about the bedrock of the histrionic art. And somewhat surprisingly, he returns to Aristotle as the bedrock critic of the theater, since the Life of the Drama is lived on stage before the study. Part I of The Life of the Drama investigates five of Aristotle's six aspects of tragedy: Plot, Character, Dialogue (for Aristotle's Diction), Thought, and Enactment (for Aristotle's Spectacle). In Part II, Bentley arrives at Aristotle's genres, Comedy and Tragedy, by way of Farce and Melodrama, and he -concludes his book on the non-Aristotelian genre, Tragicomedy. Though the book is speculative and theoretical, like the Poetics of Bentley's mentor, one feels the authority of knowledge of the drama both in text and in performance. After so probing and important a work, Bentley may be permitted his lapse into The Theatre of Commitment. If I may come full circle back to that work, I find it implicitly contradicted by some material in the "Thought" Aspect of The Life of the Drama, and "Thought" has been a consistent concern of the author of The Playwright as Thinker. "A man is not cut out to be a playwright if he is not unusually alive to 'the other side' and the strength of its 'case: A playwright ,is a dialectician. He is even an extremist, not in the sense that he espouses one extreme against another, but, rather, that he is inclined to push any contrast to its limits. If he can sometJimes be accused of 'seeing things too much in black-and-white terms,' he can never be accused of not noticing that black is black, white white." The last sentence, which partly undercuts the others, has been taken literally by some of today's committed playwrights. But in The Life of the Drama Bentley speaks only of the playwright's "commitment to the facts of experience." It is by virtue of a comparable commitment to the facts of his own wide dramatic experience that Eric Bentley has become our most considerable critic of drama and theater. Like his collections of reviews, The Theatre Of Commitment is a thin book, scarcely as big as any of its parts. Fortunately for those of us who think about plays, however, the commitment of Eric Bentley is much, much larger than the sum of even his best books. RUBY COHN San Francisco State College THE FEDERAL THEATRE, I935-I939, By Jane De Hart Mathews, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1967, 342 pp. Price $8.50. The American theater never experienced a stormier and at the same time a more exciting period than during the second Roosevelt administration when in an effort to get unemployed actors, stage hands, and directors off the relief rolls, the federal government subsidized theatrical activities across the nation. But fundamental differences between those who provided and those who controlled the subsidy became apparent immediately. To many of the WPA administrators , and Harry Hopkins himself was not immune to this mania, the important thing was to reduce the number of unemployed as quickly as possible, to provide virtually across the board relief. To theater-minded enthusiasts like 218 MODERN DRAMA September Mrs. Hallie Flanagan, the national director of the Federal Theatre Project, it was a grand opportunity to cast off conventions and restrictions and to make the theater genuinely alive. The most objective observer must admit that the theatrical achievements of the four years were spectacular. Not only were experiments like the Living Newspaper successful but plays with social relevance were boldly presented and itinerant troupes brought the theater to towns and hamlets throughout the country where the stage had been unknown. Nevertheless , Congress became suspicious of the whole project because many of the theatrical workers were undeniably linked with...

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