Similarities Between The Crucible And Mother Courage

1- Discuss the role of historical references in The Crucicle, by Arthur Miller, and in Mother Courage and her children, by Bertolt Brecht.

Both plays, The Crucible and Mother Courage and her children, deal with historical material, so they can be considered epic plays. Epic plays provide a historical distance from the event the playwright wants to analyze. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller made an analogy using the episode about witches hunt occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, as a metaphor for McCarthyism to criticize it. In Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht used the Thirty Years’ War to criticize the system, since “war is business” in its point of view. Therefore, the essential in these plays is not the exposure of the past itself, it is used to defamiliarize the event that is analyzed, to eliminate its illusion and to show how things took place. In this sense, these plays have a didactic purpose, the one to incite people to struggle for their freedom of thought, of life, etc.

2- What aspects of the epic

It prioritizes likelihood over truth. Its audience does not identify themselves with the characters, which can intensify their empathic emotion; in this way, it obscures the notion of class. In Race, some actions are shown through dialogues rather than pantomimed. The bourgeois drama was a way of bourgeoisie to build their world-view; instead, Mamet wanted to focus on the role of the system. He wanted to show how the law system functions in people’s mind; therefore, he presented the institutionalization of race as a topic for law, for this reason the characters are what the system made of them.

4- Speech is crucially important in both The Bald Prima Donna, by Eugene Ionesco, and in Krapp’s last tape, by Samuel Beckett, but its role is drastically different in these two plays. Briefly comment on the