English Coursework
A view From the Bridge-Arthur Miller
-Discuss the ways in which Alferi’s opening speech prepares the
audience for what is to come in the play A View from The Bridge.
Arthur Miller was born on October 17th,1915 in new York city with both
of his parents being immigrants into the united States. His father’s
success with his clothing manufacturing business made the family live
well untill the American economy collasped and Arthur Miller had to be
employed as a warehouseman in order to pay his school feel at Michigan
university in 1934 where he studied Economics and history. In
university playwriting became his primary ambition which led him to
earn his living from journalism and writing radio scripts in 1938
after graduating. During World War Two he also worked as a shipfitter
for two years in the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard, where a near majority of
workers were Italian and where Miller made connections with their
family centered concerns.
His first proffessionally produced stage play, The ManWho Had All The
Luck failed on Broadway in 1944. In 1947 his play All My Sons became
successful and won the Pultizer prize in 1949 for Death of a Salesman.
He also wrote plays on social events happening in USA such as The
Crucible which he wrote about the reaction to witch-hunt of left
sympathizers. He first produced a one-act play in verse of A View from
the Bridge in 1955, followed by a two-act play in 1956which was
produced in the Comedy Theatre in London. His marriage to Marilyn
Monroe, the star, ended in 1961 after about five years of marriage.
But Arthur Miller continued to write plays and became one of America’s
most accomplished playwrights with most relating to social issues or
events, politics etc.
A View from the Bridge was an idea that generated out of Arthur
Miller’s interest in the work and lives of the communities of
dockworkers and longshoremen of New York’s Brooklyn harbour where he
used to work. He encounted many immigrant workers and heard stories of
how relatives with immigrants lived. He was once told a story similar
to what he writes in this play which could have helped to fuel the
play into what it is today. Arthur Miller visited Italy and witnessed
first hand at how men gathered around their localities in hope of
getting jobs. He combined these images and stories with a modern
version of a Greek tragedy thus a central charcter led by fate towards
an unavoidable destiny.
In most Greek tragedies we note the central character is a king or
public figure being led towards fate and fights to get at what his
Arthur Miller’s success first began with his Broadway play, All My Sons, in 1947. This award winning play “Struck a note that was to become familiar in Miller’s work: the need for moral responsibility in families and society”. (Anderson 1212) Later, his production Death of a Salesman left him the group of America’s top playwrights....
Arthur Miller was an American author who was born in 1915. He wrote ‘the crucible’ in 1953 during the McCarthy period when Americans were accusing each other of pro-communist beliefs. Many of Miller’s friends were being attacked as communists and in 1956; Miller himself was brought before the House of Un-American Activities Committee where he was found guilty of beliefs in communism. The verdict was reversed in 1957 in an appeals court. The crucible was written to warn people about the mass hysteria that happened in Salem and how the McCarthy period could follow the same route.
The tradition of the tragedy, the renowned form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis, has principally become a discontinued art. Plays that evoke the sense of tragedy-the creations of Sophocles, Euripides, and William Shakespeare-have not been recreated often, nor recently due to its complex nature. The complexity of the tragedy is due to the plot being the soul of the play, while the character is only secondary. While the soul of the play is the plot, according to Aristotle, the tragic hero is still immensely important because of the need to have a medium of suffering, who tries to reverse his situation once he discovers an important fact, and the sudden downturn in the hero’s fortunes. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is the modern tragedy of a common man named Willy Loman, who, like Oedipus from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, exhibits some qualities of a tragic hero. However, the character Willy Loman should not be considered a full-on tragic hero because, he although bears a comparable tragic flaw in his willingness to sacrifice everything to maintain his own personal dignity, he is unlike a true tragic hero, like Oedipus, because he was in full control of his fate where Oedipus was not.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a symbolism for his own failing marriage and the communist hunt in America at this time in his life. However, almost 50 years later, Miller also wrote the screenplay for his movie adaption of the play. Moreover, there were definite changes to scenes, characters, and dialog, between the play and the movie. Miller’s variation to his own play, showcase key differences in Abigail Williams, through his changes in her persona, relationship with John Proctor, and the added scenes in the film.
Schroeder, Patricia R. "Arthur Miller: Illuminating Process." The Presence of the Past in Modern American Drama. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. 76-104. Rpt. in Drama Criticism. Vol. 31. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
The night of January 2, 1953 in the heart of New York many have traveled to see the first premiere of the crucible of who they have heard to be the over-slightly liberal Arthur Miller. The play is not reportage of any kind,” Miller said. “Nobody can write a tragedy and make it reportage. What I was doing was writing a fictional story about an important theme." Words such as these were the very ones that began to make people question the truth in his words. Considering the due date of this play “so happened” to be at the peak of the red scare, Miller further on was known, or rather accused, as a communist sympathizer. However, the more sympathetic of
Arthur Miller is an American playwright who produced the play ‘A View from the Bridge’. The play is set in an Italian-American neighborhood called Red Hook, a slum area, in New York at the Brooklyn Bridge Eddie, the play's protagonist, is a man who drives his own life to doom due to his inappropriate feelings for his niece, which is the primary reason for his downfall. Miller conveys the development of the character of Eddie Carbone through language and the key themes along with stage directions. Tension is initiated in the play by the language used like exclamatory and interrogative sentences.
Set ages apart, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex provide different perspectives on the topic of tragedy and what is defined as a tragic hero. Although Oedipus would be thought of as better representing the tragic hero archetype due to tradition and time period, the modern tragic hero of Oedipus Rex is more of a dismal one. Through analysis of their respective hamartias, it is exemplified that the New York businessman with his humble story proves to be more thought provoking than the King of Thebes and his melancholic tale. **By incorporating a more relatable character and plot, Arthur Miller lends help to making Willy Lowman spiral toward his own downfall while building more emotion and response from the audience than with Oedipus. When Oedipus learns of his awful actions, this invokes shock and desperation.
Arthur Miller was a good man, and with a good man comes character strengths. He always put forth the effort to judge a man by his rightful position and his fair play. He also attempted to judge a man by his moral sanity and his welfare of the community (Foner and Garraty, 1). Miller never judged someone based upon a first impression. He made great attempts to know people thoroughly before finally judging them. This was one of the greater strengths he posses in life. This helped him build the reputation that stuck with him over the years and that he became known for.
Arthur Miller felt the effects of misfortune throughout his entire life which helped him write notable works like The Crucible and Death Of A Salesman, this made him criticizable for political indifferences and melodramatic effects. Arthur Miller was an American playwright and a prominent figure in twentieth century theater. He won multiple prestigious awards including the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2001 Praemium Imperiale. Arthur Miller probed America’s moral conscience relentlessly and cast a light on the issues troubling America. Arthur Miller had a very rough personal life with many ups and downs along the road.
Arthur Miller wrote plays as a way of showing people the real picture of what life was really like during the Great Depression and after World War II. Before the Great Depression many Americans were living in a significant time period, the Roaring Twenties. People had radios, automobiles, and movies with sounds. Then it all suddenly came to an end with the Stock Market Crash, leading to the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, Americans faced poverty, and had no income because jobs weren’t available. Throughout his life Miller influenced many people with his plays, and his contributions to this day because people want to read and understand what was truly happening in past history. For example, “The Crucible” is a play about the Salem Witch Trials, giving a good understanding of the basics that went on in this time period. Another example of Miller’s influential work is “The Death of a Sales Man”, which is his way of showing what life was like when people were struggling financially during the Stock Market Crash. Overall, Arthur Miller is one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century.
"A View From A Bridge" is a play by Arthur Miller. It is set in 1950s
reputation: Death of a Salesman…” (“Bloom’s Notes” 8). Other plays that Miller has written include The Crucible and All My Sons. He also “…published an autobiography, several volumes of essays, two collections of short stories, and two novels…” (Gioia and Ken...
Born into a wealthy family in 1915 in New York City, Arthur Miller would become one of America’s finest playwrights. Like many of the families during the Great Depression, Miller’s family suffered financial and social collapse during the 1930s. In order to pay for his education at the University of Michigan, he took on menial jobs that offered him the opportunity to be surrounded by those who had also suffered the same downfall from the Depression. These experiences would shape how and what Miller would write about in the future, including his Pulitzer Prize winning play, Death of a Salesman and the main character of the play, Willy Loman. Narcissism, mental illness, and the downfall of the American dream, define Willy Loman’s character in
A view from the bridge is a play set in the late 1940s and is based in