Hebraic Lore in Maxwell Anderson's Winterset

Abstract

T HE STRONG HEBREW ELEMENT in Maxwell Anderson's poetic drama Winterset has long been recognized; Esdras, obviously the prophet of Jewish apocalyptic literature, supplies the audience with the necessary key to the rabbinical wisdom which lies at the basis of the problem of argued in the play. But relatively few, perhaps, have realized the full extent to which the rabbinical wisdom permeates the play. Thus it is possible to overlook the significance of even the simple fact necessary to the full understanding of the play, that the bridge-setting serves as more than the physical background of the action; in reality, the bridge dominates the play as symbol of space and time. Since Esdras steadfastly visualizes the problem of in a universal setting or moral process of history which he defines in terms of space-time imagery, it becomes clear that the meaning of the play cannot be understood apart from Esdras's Jewish teachings. The purpose of this essay is to establish the Hebraic lore from which the spacetime imagery is derived as the intellectual framework from within which Anderson seeks, first, to elucidate his view of the contrast between abstract and its practical administration in courts of law and, secondly, to portray the effort of men when fails to wrest something from defeat and death-in a word, to indicate how men are ennobled in the midst of tragedy. The governing idea of Winterset is of justice deferred until a final Judgment Day: each character stands in expressive relation to this concept; each space-time image is focused in it. Esdras is its raisonneur in the play; and as he counsels in turn his son Garth, Judge Gaunt, and Mio, he gives expression to the Jewish Messianic belief upon which the concept of justice deferred is based. It will be well to examine the Jewish Messianic belief in itself before determining its function in the play. The Messianic ideal was born in times of the Jewish nation's loss of political independence, but the factor which contributed to