I cannot say when I have been more provoked by a book than I was by The Life of the Drama. In both senses—I found it provoking and provocative, but more often the former. I can best indicate the ambivalence I feel toward the book by citing the conflicting reactions I had to it. Reading it was a chore. I found myself struggling through page after page, reading from a sense of duty only, and then coming suddenly on a section which caught my attention, absorbed me, made me think (for a moment) that this was the book I had hoped it would be. Similarly, I found myself convinced that the book would never be useful to me—that what it had to say was either too familiar or too quirky—and then I would hear myself in the classroom using a casual remark of Bentley's to...