2 - The tradition of social drama

Summary

By his own account, Arthur Miller's admiration for the classical Greek dramatists began with his earliest efforts at playwriting, when he was a student at the University of Michigan. “When I began to write,” he has said in an interview, “one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began with Aeschylus and went through about twenty-five hundred years of playwriting.” Asked in 1966 which playwrights he admired most when he was young, he replied, “first the Greeks, for their magnificent form, the symmetry. Half the time I couldn't really repeat the story because the characters in the mythology were completely blank to me. I had no background at that time to know really what was involved in these plays, but the architecture was clear. . . That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned in” (Martin, Theater Essays, pp. 265-66). He has written in his autobiography Timebends that, once he began to write plays and “confront dramatic problems” himself, he “read differently than [he] had before, in every period of Western drama” (p. 232).