Bentley Praises 'Types' As Dramatic Characters

Eric Bentley attacked last night the "prevalent view" that a good playwright creates real characters and asserted that all of drama's greatest characters are "types."

"Types can always be summed up in a few phrases," Bentley explained in his last Charles Eliot Norton Lecture of the Fall Term. A type is a "person whose future is predictable, because he is a creature of habit."

He described as "semi-literate" those who praise playwrights for creating "believable characters." Shakespeare's minor characters, for example, "present only a single quality, or tone," Bentley maintained. His major characters are only "emotional forces."

The word "type," however, does not describe the characters of a good drama adequately, Bentley added. Emphasizing that bad modern dramas often "explain their characters," he remarked that "fundamental traits, in a great drama, may often be misleading."

Drama is not an accurate reproduction of life, Bentley maintained. It sees, at most, a part of life, and a story which seems life-like "reveals itself on analysis to be not life-like."

"Of birth, copulation, and death, only death can be readily reproduced on stage," he remarked, "and death is an experience no one in the audience has ever had."

Giving another example, he declared: "The kitchen maid would not need the penny novelette if she could have such excitement in the kitchen, or even on the back stairway."

Bentley indicated two traits which distinguish the drama from the novel. The first, he said, is that drama moves at a "higher speed"; the second, that the audience can see the actors "in flesh and blood." Since they are sitting in the same room with the actors, they can be entertained without having to entertain in return, an "ideal situation."