Drama criticism

Though his contributions ranged over a number of subjects, Brown developed a particular interest in the theatre. He became a drama critic for the Saturday Review in 1923 and was named the Shute lecturer in the art of the theatre at Liverpool University three years later. In 1929, Brown joined The Observer as their drama critic. In the decade that followed, he emerged as the most influential and insightful drama critic in the British press, a status acknowledged in 1939 with his appointment as professor of drama in the Royal Society of Literature and his selection as director of drama for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts the following year.^[1]

Attacks on modernist poetry

Brown made quite a show of his unwillingness to follow fashionable literary and cultural nostrums. Some of his best writings are beautifully crafted and often hilarious polemics on modern poetry, music and manners. This can be seen (sometimes with a startling effect on today's reader) in such works as I Commit to the Flames, in which, for example, he is particularly scathing about Eliot and Pound:

Mr T. S. Eliot offers the public the balderdash of his Waste-Land (pretentious bungling with the English language) and immediately becomes a pundit, bestriding the Atlantic with his cultural messages....our immunity from such poetry continually weakens; it has now been discovered that half-baked intellectuals will worship baby-talk and even persuade other people to pay for it....Gibberish levels all minds....Hence the popularity of modern verse....the source of the trouble is a general flight from reason....belief in the omnipotence of the sub-conscious for faith in self-determination of the will by reason guided.

And again:

....the Prophet Ezra at large among the alphabet, his Ps and Qs in a fine frenzy rolling....Mr. Pound 'uses quotations and translations and reminiscence and single words which are often meant to convey a large burden outside themselves' [here quoting Grigson]. This is one of T. S. Eliot's antics, as readers of The Waste-land have somewhat painfully discovered....Why, too, should he [the reader] grub about The Waste-land to root up the dubious truffles of Mr. Eliot's scholarship?

Writings on Shakespeare

Brown had a particular interest in Shakespeare, publishing several books about his life and career, and one on the poet's love life. He also wrote a play about Shakespeare's lost love Anne Whateley in 1937, published in 1947, and broadcast on the BBC in 1953, starring Irene Worth as Anne and John Gregson as Shakespeare.^[2]

Linguistics Observations

Brown showed an interest in grammar and the use of words from his earliest writings. His 1920s essay "Winning Out", published in The Saturday Review, lightly criticizes an observed trend coming from America to adorn verbs with prepositions. Brown went on to write an immensely popular series of fifteen books on the subject of how words are used and called attention to unusual features of language use with humor and charm.