Criticism > Drama Criticism > Pirandello, Luigi - Overviews And General Studies

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OVERVIEWS AND GENERAL STUDIES

Eric Bentley (essay date 1946)

SOURCE: "Varieties of Comic Experience," in The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946, pp. 127-57.

[In the following excerpt, Bentley characterizes Pirandello as a pessimist who speaks for the people "who have lived through the extraordinary vicissitudes of the twentieth century, uncomprehending passively suffering. "]

Since Shaw and Wilde no dramatist has written first-rate drawing-room comedies. The best have been by our Maughams and Behrmans and Bernsteins. Writers have been turning from the formality of the drawing room toward a grotesqueness which, in its nearness to commedia dell' arte or to Aristophanes, may seem more primitive, yet which, in its psychological depth and intricacy, may well be more sophisticated. Strindberg … sometimes achieved comedy by giving a quick twist to one of his own tragic...

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1. Introduction
2. Biographical Information
3. Major Works
4. Critical Reception
5. Principal Works
6. Author Commentary
7. Overviews And General Studies
8. Six Characters In Search Of An Author
9. Critical Commentary
10. Henry Iv
11. Further Reading
12. Copyright

1. Drama