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Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman/The Crucible. Readers' Guide to Essential Criticism By Stephen Marino New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015
In an ambitious and lucidly written critical study titled Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman/The Crucible. Readers' Guide to Essential Criticism, Stephen Marino discusses in painstaking detail the biographical, critical, social, and cultural development of Miller's two most popular plays. Both Death of a Salesman and The Crucible have been recognized as the most often performed and most widely read plays in Miller's canon; indeed, Marino quotes Christopher Bigsby's assertion that the plays were written during the "Golden Age of American drama."
In the eight chapters that compose Marino's study, he carefully tracks the progressive development of the criticism that has accompanied the two works from the earliest reviews from 1949 to 1969 to the poststructuralist approaches that arose in the late 1980s and 1990s. Marino examines the early criticism that immediately followed the production of the plays in chapter 1, the elements of society and tragedy in chapter 2, the psychological and ethnic slants of the plays in chapter 3, the tenets of history, law, and politics in chapter 4, contemporary poststructural and feminist and gender readings in chapters 5 through 7, and finally media versions of the plays in chapter 8. Marino arbitrarily divides the critical response to the two plays into three periods: from 1944 to 1968, a "middle period" from 1968 to the mid-1980s, and a final era from the late 1980s to the present. He aptly discusses in detail the tension as well as the relationship between theater criticism and literary criticism as one considers the several facets of both plays. Marino states his purpose succinctly in his introduction: "This book aims to identify the seminal texts and major areas of discussion that have developed since Salesman and The Crucible premiered and highlight some of the major critics who have influenced the critical judgement of Miller's masterpieces."
The "Reviews and Early Criticism" highlighted in chapter 1 examine initial popular and scholarly reactions to Salesman and Crucible; while The Crucible received mixed reviews, some even negative and hostile, Salesman was heralded as an innovation in American drama. The "Early Criticism" section of the chapter reviews critical reactions to Willy Loman's "character"- his...