Broken Glass: Fifty Years Forward to the Past

Abstract

Arthur Miller’s career of some fifty years of playwriting, extending from the 1940s to the mid-1990s, incorporates three dominant influences: the structure of Aristotelian tragedy, Ibsen’s adaptation of it in depicting the modern age, and Miller’s own deeply rooted Jewish heritage. Arguably his last great play, Broken Glass reflects these elemental strains and is especially reminiscent of Ibsen’s Ghosts, the first Ibsen play that Miller witnessed onstage. Although Miller adopted absurdist and postmodern features in his later plays, he never abandoned these elemental sources of his art. Broken Glass forms an arc spanning a half-century of his evolving work, linking the past securely to the present, the end to the beginning of his dramatic art.