Newspaper Article

Obituary: G. E. Bentley

Jamieson, Michael

1994

Overview

Bentley was an early member of what was in the Forties a very small band of Shakespeareans gathering at Stratford-upon-Avon under the aegis of Sir Barry Jackson and Professor Allardyce Nicoll. The first volume of the annual Shakespeare Survey appeared in 1948, and it printed an influential essay of Bentley's, \"Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre\", which had originated in 1947 as a lecture at the Stratford International Conference. In that paper Bentley placed Shakespeare's last plays in what he always saw as the proper context, \"the London Commercial theatre and the organised professional troupe\". He put forward the view that the distinctiveness of the four romances - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest - could be traced to Shakespeare's response, under the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher, to the new stage conditions and the privileged audience at the \"private\" theatre at Blackfriars, in London. Bentley continued to attend the bi-annual conferences for many years as his own research took him regularly from the United States, where he had a teaching post, to Britain. Bentley later made available and accessible to students and other readers much of his prodigious research into such matters as censorship, control of playhouses, court performances, and the earnings of writers and actors in two briskly organised books, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (1971) and its sequel, The Profession of Player (1984). He also published Shakespeare and Jonson: their reputations in the Seventeenth Century compared (1945) as well as Shakespeare and his Theatre (1964) and Shakespeare: a biographical handbook (1961). It is perhaps revealing that this handbook puts forward no theory about Shakespeare's sexuality. Not that Bentley was averse to speculation. In the preface to the \"three long overdue volumes\" of 1956 he wrote that he had \"tried to suppress my comments on the literary and dramatic values of the plays - not always successfully.\" He added that he had at first proposed to refrain also from any speculation and to print only the evidence at hand.

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Bentley, G E / Chambers, Edmund / Greenwood, Esther / Nicoll, Allardyce / Stern, Ellen Voigt