Eric Bentley

Eric Bentley 1916-, American critic, editor, and translator, b. Bolton, England, grad. Oxford, 1938, Ph.D. Yale, 1941. A highly regarded and rigorously intellectual critic, particularly of the drama, Bentley is the author of such works as A Century of Hero-Worship (1944), The Playwright as Thinker (1946), Bernard Shaw (1947), What Is Theatre? (1956), The Life of the Drama (1964), The Importance of Scrutiny (1964), Theatre of War (1972), Brecht Commentaries (1981), Thinking about the Playwright (1987), and Bentley on Brecht (1998). He is also known for his translations of plays by Bertolt Brecht and Luigi Pirandello and for his editions of collected plays, including The Classic Theatre (4 vol., 1958-61). He was the drama critic for the New Republic from 1952 to 1956 and taught at Columbia, where he was a professor until 1969, and several other universities. Also a playwright, Bentley has written about a number of plays since the 1970s, on a wide variety of subjects including Galileo, Oscar Wilde, and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Bentley, Eric Russell (1916– ), English-born critic, director, and playwright, best known for his promotion of the work of Brecht in the English-speaking world; having begun to translate Brecht's plays in the 1940s he collaborated with the author on a production of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder in Munich in 1950. His work as a director also includes Him by e. e. cummings, with Kenneth Tynan in the lead, in Salzburg and García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin (both 1950). In the same year he codirected O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, in a German translation, in Zurich. He was drama critic of the New Republic from 1952 to 1956. His own plays include Are You Now or Have You Ever Been…? (1972), The Recantation of Galileo Galilei (1973), and Expletive Deleted (1974); he has adapted and translated plays by Pirandello and Schnitzler as well as Brecht and written a number of books on the theatre.