In one of his earliest essays on drama, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Arthur Miller formulated his position on the nature and function of tragedy. The tragic feeling, he writes, is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal dignity. There is also a personal factor – no one is flawless – but the human situation is a product of forces outside the individual person and the tragedy inherent in this situation is a consequence of the individual’s attempts to fight against an order that degrades. The function of tragedy is to reveal the truth concerning our society, which frustrates and denies man his right to personal dignity; and the enlightenment of tragedy is the discover of the moral that supports this right.
Among the many influences on the writing of Arthur Miller was Greek drama. He admired the ritualistic aspect, the sense of form and symmetry of events. In Greek tragedy the individual is influenced strongly by forces outside of himself – his fate is foretold by oracles, and in many ways, the hero is not responsible for his actions. Our own perceptions of universal law and the role of the individual in society have changed such that this dramatic world view would not currently work. Miller was interested in developing a form which would function in the same kind of relationship to the moral crises of the twentieth (and twenty-first…) century as did Greek, Shakespearean or any other tragic drama – each to its own era. In his view, the best drama is social drama, that is, drama which illuminates the ties between the individual and society. As in Greek tragedy, there are forces beyond us that determine our fate, but our own will as well as the events of our own past, are called into play at all times.
