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Dan Rebellato

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Statler and Waldorf.jpg

Criticism

Statler and Waldorf.jpg

I have a lot of time for critics, good ones anyway, but I did laugh to read this passage from the memoir of nineteenth-century playwright Henry Becque:

When my friends and I were young, passionate starstruck artists, naturally we had dreams of doing something. Poetry, I should say, was our first temptation and, no doubt, the most practical. After poetry came the novel, the analysis of that poor human heart that we barely knew. We also used to think about the theatre, although the theatre, with all its barriers and restrictions, put us off somewhat. Amongst all these areas which attracted us equally, criticism never came up; we just didn’t consider it. Passing judgement on other people’s work and never showing your own seemed to us the height of impudence. If one of us, in a moment of mad enthusiasm, had clapped his hand to his head and said, ‘I want to be a great critic’, how we would have laughed.

Henry Becque Souvenirs d’un Auteur Dramatique in: Oeuvres Complètes Vol, 6. Paris: Crès, 1926, p. 70. My translation.

​

April 10, 2012 by Dan Rebellato.
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Dan Rebellato

playwright, teacher, academic

 

You may be here because you’ve come across a book, or play, or article of mine and you want to know more. Maybe you’re a student or a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance and you want to find out more about me. Maybe you are gathering ammunition for a vicious ad hominem attack that will expose me for the charlatan that I am.  

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  • News
  • Spilled Ink
    • Complete List of Plays
    • 7 Ghosts
    • Cavalry
    • Chekhov in Hell
    • Dead Souls
    • Emily Rising
    • Here's What I Did With My Body One Day
    • Killer
    • Mile End
    • Negative Signs of Progress
    • My Life Is a Series of People Saying Goodbye
    • Restless Dreams
    • Slow Air
    • Slow Beasts
    • Static
    • Theatremorphosis
    • You & Me
    • Zola: Blood, Sex & Money
    • Complete List of Publications
    • 1956 and All That
    • Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
    • Contemporary European Playwrights
    • Contemporary European Theatre Directors
    • Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009
    • No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We
    • On Churchill's Influences
    • Paris Commune
    • Playwriting
    • Sarah Kane before Blasted
    • Sarah Kane Documentary
    • The Suspect Culture Book
    • Theatre &
    • Theatre & Globalization
    • When We Talk of Horses
    • Writ Large
  • Stage Directions
  • Wilding Audio
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  • About
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