Yet we must use the perspective of our own point in time for what it is worth. What follows is an attempt to do so, an attempt motivated by a deep concern with dramatic art and its fate in our civilization, by a feeling that something is wrong which might — at least partly — be put right. There would of course be nothing new in urging that the money-changers should be driven out of our temples with whips. What I shall urge is that the temples be left to the money-changers to wallow in; the true faith must survive — if at all — elsewhere. The hope of the theater — I shall maintain — lies outside the commercial theater altogether. Not that we can forget the money-changers. They are fat and influential. They have the scribes and Pharisees on their side: in plain words the scholars and critics of the theater — or at least a high proportion of them — have sold themselves to the managers. The academicians are determined to be unacademic.

So much the worse for them. If it is academic to see plays in their concrete context of thinking, feeling, and doing, rather than in the context of footlights and box offices, then there is much to be said for academicism. I should be happy to oppose the antiacademicism of even the best of the regular theater critics, George Jean Nathan, who holds that a good play is not a thing that can profitably be examined in detail and that criticism of great drama is therefore fruitless or impossible. My own conviction is that any good thing is a very good thing and that any good work of art can bear the closest scrutiny. The better, the closer. The most revolutionary tenet to be advanced in this book is this: the drama can be taken seriously. “A play,” as Oscar Wilde said, “is as personal and individual a form of self-expression as a poem or a picture.” It follows that the playwrights must have a self to express. Our commercial playwrights have none. They are as nearly as possible nobody. The imaginative playwright is somebody.

Eric Bentley
The Playwright as Thinker (pp. 18-19)