This victim of more words than ever before inflicted on any other living subject has recently been castigated by both wordsmen and -women for "scraping the bottom of [his] ... barrel" in offering recent plays and prose: "brief exercises," "tableaux vivants," "having ceased to be comic, "intensity at the cost of .. . depth," and the inevitable "nothing remains to say," are some of the accusations — always carefully hedged by "the beginnings of critical wisdom" or some such safety clause. The implication is that these late works are either empty echoes of what was or benign sputterings replacing what can no longer be.