In recent years the sources and conceptual foundations of the epic produced during the Italian Renaissance have been documented in great detail. We have been confirmed in the knowledge that this literary genre developed and was decisively shaped by the relatively small but cohesive city of Ferrara, and that it was promoted by its rulers, the dukes of the House of Este. The three major practitioners of the genre, Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441-94), Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), and to a lesser extent Torquato Tasso (1544-95), lived in that court and knew intimately the twists and turns of the Este genealogical history. They wrote their epics - respectively the Orlando Innamorato, the Orlando Furioso, and the Gerusalemme Liberata - in that courtly context and were immersed in its mythology and rituals. By living in close contact with the intellectual-political events of the court, they were bound to take part, as they did, in its lively cultural activities and innovations. These ranged from the theatre to humanistic theories of education, to steady speculations over ethical systems that more often than not slid into monotonous restatements of the nature of virtue and values, to elaborate artistic productions, such as the 'Sala dei Mesi' by Francesco del Cossa (1436-78) commissioned by Borso d'Este for the Schifanoia Palace. These activities signal the Estes' efforts to make their city emerge from the grips of its provincialism. Both the role of the university and the presence of these intellectuals in Ferrara cannot be treated as random episodes in the court's cultural life.

Since his first Broadway success, commercial filmmakers, in the US and abroad, have shown great interest in the works, especially the plays but also the prose fiction, of Arthur Miller. There are in fact, as of May 2009, some seventy-two films based in some sense on his writings (if we include productions on which he has worked in some capacity as a writer but not, strictly speaking, as the author of an adapted property). More than half of these films, some forty-one, were made and exhibited in Europe, a telling indication of the playwright’s international reputation, which shows every sign of strengthening in the twenty-first century.

Miller’s works, no doubt, remain an important source for filmmakers. A screen version of The Man Who Had All the Luck (produced on Broadway in 1944 and successfully revived in 2002) is at this writing in production, directed by Scott Ellis, who was responsible for the recent New York stage production. And currently in development is a new film version of A View from the Bridge (produced on Broadway in 1955 and with a very successful British production in 2009). The film is reportedly to be directed by major Hollywood player Barry Levinson and to star Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, and Anthony LaPaglia, three of the current American independent cinema’s most respected performers. On the one hand, such enthusiasm for Miller is neither surprising nor exceptional.

Sometime during the Restoration, the status of epic as the highest poetic genre went into a decline from which it has never recovered. As T. S. Eliot said, 'since Milton, we have had no great epic poem'. Great poems with epic aspirations or pretensions have continued to be written: Wordsworth's Prelude, Byron's Don Juan, Keats's Hyperion poems, Eliot's Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, and of course (though in prose) Joyce's Ulysses. The great example in our time is Walcott's Omeros. None of these, however, belongs straightforwardly to the genre of the Iliad, the Aeneid, or Paradise Lost, in the sense of being a long poem, in elevated language, on a high theme of tribal glory, or national origins, or scriptural myth, containing narratives of battle, and usually a high valuation of martial prowess. Many of them remained unfinished, or (like the Waste Land and perhaps the Cantos) mimic the unfinished state in being organized in 'fragments'. All these works bear some relation to the epic tradition, allusive and often ironic, but each proceeds from a sense that the primary or traditional form is no longer available to good poets. Some (Don Juan, the Waste Land, Ulysses) sustain a pointed ironic relationship, and use epic reminders and mock-heroic procedures to exploit continuities and disjunctions between past and present, or the collision of grandiloquent perspectives with a lowered reality. In this regard, they were descendants of what one might call the first mock-heroic moment, when, perhaps for the only time in history, some of the best poets devoted some of their strongest energies to a hybrid genre that parodied the epic but did not satirize it.

What isn't epic? Very little it seems. This claim can be made confidently from a cursory contemplation of the range of the literature that is normally termed as epic and that is surviving from antiquity. Epic could vary in length from approximately 408 lines (Catullus's sixty-fourth poem) to approximately 9,894 lines (Virgil's Aeneid). Its themes could range from the comic or parodic (there is a whole subgenre in Greek devoted to this theme: the Batrachomyomachia or the Margites are typical) to the heroic (Homer's Iliad or Virgil's Aeneid, for example), from the 'religious' (such as the Homeric Hymns) to the philosophical (Lucretius's On the Nature of the Universe), from the annalistic historical epic (Ennius's Annales) to the didactic (Virgil's Georgics or Manilius's Astronomica), from the romantic (Virgil's Aeneid Book 4) to the militaristic (Silius Italicus's Punica). Epic, it seems, was the most capacious of genres. This simple observation is something that matches the occasional descriptions of the genre from antiquity, such as those of Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, 10.1.46-50) or Manilius (the beginning of the second book of his Astronomica). Given the thematic diversity of these poems, it is very hard to be prescriptive about the timbre of Roman (or Greek) epic, let alone to pin down a precise essence of such ancient poetry. There would be little value in saying, for example, that Roman (or ancient) epic poetry was serious, or that it was very long, or that it was just about kings and battles. It clearly was not.

When the Wooster Group, one of the more controversial of the experimental theatrical troupes active during the 1970s and 1980s, incorporated segments of The Crucible (1953) into their performance piece entitled LSD (… Just the High Points …) (1984), Arthur Miller’s threat of legal action eventually forced the project to be withdrawn from the stage. Even though the excerpts included from Miller’s work were reduced first from forty-five minutes to twenty-five minutes and then later to ten minutes – and that recited virtually in gibberish – the dramatist objected on the grounds that such a treatment might be regarded as a parody, which violated his initial intention, rather than an homage, and so might somehow preclude a serious New York revival of his play. Not only does Miller’s action provide a fascinating case study in the ongoing debate over who “owns” or maintains interpretive authority over the written text when it becomes a performance text – the author or the director – it also evidences what might seem a peculiar paradox. As David Savran notes, “By insisting on his own interpretation, Miller has, ironically, aligned himself with the very forces that The Crucible condemns, those authorities who exercise their power arrogantly and arbitrarily to ensure their own continued political and cultural dominion.”

Like other Indo-European peoples, the Greeks of the early period delighted in poetry and song which glorified the deeds and destinies of great heroes, their predecessors and, as they often believed, their ancestors. Such songs illustrated the nature of the world and showed their own connection with the gods. In most traditions, once literacy comes in, such oral poems look old fashioned. They lose favour, they are not written down, and soon they are forgotten. Sometimes a revival of interest may lead antiquarians to search and to rediscover some of them. That was the fate of the Old English epic of Beowulf, which was rescued, surviving in a single manuscript, from the wreck of a larger oral literature. Most of the old heroic songs, however, simply disappear. When learned men come to search for them, they are not to be found. That is what happened to the epic poems that were sung in early Rome, before the impact of Greek literature from the third century BC. Cicero already knew only a vague tradition that they had existed; he wished, vainly, that he could read them. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome were meant as an attempt to recreate a couple of those lost martial songs. The Greek tradition was importantly different. When literacy came in, many of the old songs were lost; but the Iliad and the Odyssey - the two long oral epic poems ascribed to 'Homer' - did not fall from favour. They always continued to be recited, read and highly valued. Familiarity with Homer was expected of any Hellene not utterly illiterate. The epics are characterized by the regular repetition of formulaic phrases and verses, originally a mnemonic device for the singer, who performs by constant re-creation from memory.

First performed as a one-act play in 1955, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge was later rewritten and restaged as a full-length, two-act play. Miller’s Introduction to the second version comments on both the expansion of the play and its source. Of the latter, Miller remarks: “I had known the story of A View from the Bridge for a long time. A water-front worker who had known Eddie’s prototype told it to me. I had never thought to make a play of it because it was too complete, there was nothing I could add.” In Timebends, his autobiography, Miller speaks at length of his interest in the Brooklyn waterfront and of his relationship with Vincent James “Vinny” Longhi, whom he describes as “a new member of the bar with political ambitions.”Longhi and Longhi’s friend, Mitch Berenson, sought out Miller to help them make known and keep alive the work of Pete Panto, a young longshoreman who had earned a gangland execution for attempting to foment a revolt against the union leadership of Joseph Ryan, the corrupt and probably Mafia-affiliated then head of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). With Longhi and Berenson as his cicerones, Miller entered the dark, dangerous, corrupt world of Red Hook, the largely Italian, Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood. From this experience and from a Longhi anecdote the story and atmosphere of A View from the Bridge seem to have been born:

Personally, the 1980s were stable years for Arthur Miller. Sixty-five when the decade began, Miller had long since established himself as a, if not the, major figure in the American theatre. Having returned to playwriting in 1964 with After the Fall, a play that may well have helped him come to terms with his first two marriages and the suicide of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, the Miller of the 1980s shared a comfortable life in Roxbury, Connecticut, with his third wife, Inge Morath, a professional photographer who co-produced three handsome travel accounts with her husband: In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979).

Miller had purchased the Roxbury farm during his marriage to Monroe, but he seldom used the residence until he married Morath. By the 1980s, the couple had raised a daughter there and sent the young Rebecca to Yale. Miller, who, like Willy Loman, longed to work with his hands, found the eighteenth-century frame house a hospitable setting for his hobby, which, since the age of six, was carpentry. Relaxed in his Roxbury home (and only moderately disrupted by a 1983 fi re that claimed a portion of it, including his best books), Miller dedicated many hours to drafting and redrafting the copious manuscripts of the last thirty years. In the 1980s, colleagues and interviewers reported that the gentleman farmer/carpenter/writer/husband/ father was personally content.

In his biography of Charlemagne, Einhard (d. 840) speaks highly of the emperor's educational programme and mentions among his achievements that he ordered 'the age-old narrative poems, barbarous enough, it is true, in which were celebrated the warlike deeds of the kings of ancient times' to be written down and in this way preserved for posterity. These native songs from ancient times ('barbara et antiquissima carmina') were no doubt heroic narrative songs in the vernacular, celebrating the deeds of past heroes and ancestors. Almost 750 years earlier, in his Germania, the Roman historian Tacitus had mentioned the 'ancient songs' of the Germanic peoples, which according to him reached back into a mythic past and were their only kind of historical tradition. Charlemagne's efforts to have these narrative songs recorded in writing came at a time when native oral traditions were still flourishing but when the predominant culture in the West was Latin, Christian, and literate. Charlemagne, although illiterate himself, did much for the spread of literacy, not least by gathering the leading minds of Latin Christendom at his Palace School. One of them was Alcuin, an Englishman, 'the most learned man of his time' according to Einhard. In 797 Alcuin wrote a letter to the bishop of Lindisfarne complaining that it had come to his notice that the monks in the Northumbrian monastery preferred to listen to the harpist singing vernacular heroic lays rather than to the reader of holy books in their refectory. 'What has Ingeld to do with Christ?' he asks, and continues, 'The house of the Lord is narrow, it cannot hold both.'

Winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of 1947, All My Sons is the work that launched Arthur Miller’s long and distinguished career in the theatre. While few would argue that it is Miller’s best or most important play, no one would dispute the fact that All My Sons deserves a special place in the playwright’s canon because it constitutes his first major theatrical achievement, displays his extraordinary skill in handling dramatic form, and presages even better things yet to come from one of America’s greatest dramatists.

The critical and commercial success of All My Sons marks a major turning point in Miller’s career, for it came at a time when the young writer was struggling to establish his identity as a literary artist. Having won several awards for playwriting while he was enrolled in undergraduate school at the University of Michigan, Miller continued to develop the texts of stage plays even while supporting himself by working at odd jobs and successfully writing radio plays for the Columbia Workshop (CBS) and the Cavalcade of America (NBC) between the years 1939 and 1943. During the next two years, however, several events occurred that both challenged his commitment to playwriting and advanced his career as a writer.

Introduction to the first edition

Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, on 17 October 1915, a long way from the Connecticut hills where he has lived for nearly half a century, though not quite as far as it may seem. Harlem, then, was an elegant and mixed neighborhood, partly German, partly Italian, Jewish, and black. There was open space. His mother could watch him walk to a school which she herself had attended, down unthreatening streets.

The family was wealthy. His father, an all but illiterate immigrant from Poland, had built up a clothing business which employed a thousand workers. That all ended with the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The houses grew smaller, family life more tense. They moved to Brooklyn. At thirteen he wanted to be a soldier and go to West Point. Three years later, with the Depression biting hard, he “wanted to be anything that was going.” The “anything” extended to being a crooner. For a brief while he had a radio programme of his own: “I sang the latest hits and had a blind pianist with lots of dandruff.”

The 1970s was a decade of nearly devastating turmoil for the United States from which in many ways it is still recovering. The American incursion into Cambodia leading to the bloody protests at Kent State University, the withdrawal from Vietnam after years of divisive protest at home, South Vietnam’s eventual collapse, Watergate, and the resignation of a president under disgrace all shook the very foundation of a United States that was anything but united.

Miller created three works for the stage in the seventies that confronted and expanded upon the cultural divisiveness so prevalent then and still present today. The Creation of the World and Other Business and The American Clock each offered reflections on the issue of authenticating existence by assuming individual and collective responsibility for our various internal failures. These two plays, written in the early seventies, work well with the hard-hitting and existentially disturbing play, The Archbishop ’ s Ceiling (written in 1977 but only to receive its final, revised form in 1984), which confronts the questionable effects of our attempts to exercise that authenticity in a world that has lost moral control of its own destiny. Two plays present an ideal, and one puts the ideal into direct confrontation with the real, all three adding up to a serious debate on how that ideal can survive and affect the shifting reality it encounters. Interestingly, none of them directly confronts actual issues afflicting 1970s America, such as Vietnam or Watergate; rather, they move into somewhat unexpected realms in their search for cures to those immediate contemporary ills. The result is that they speak to us even today, unencumbered by any dated address to 1970s particulars.

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). Regarding these plays no longer as “marble masterworks but improvisations that their authors had simply given up trying to perfect” gave Miller a new perspective on the classics:

In 1990 Arthur Miller was seventy-five years old. He might have been forgiven for settling into a cosy retirement. Henrik Ibsen wrote his last play at seventy-one while Samuel Beckett produced little after he was sixty. His public career had already lasted forty-six years, longer than those of Chekhov, Strindberg, Brecht, O’Neill, or Williams. Yet the 1990s proved his most prolific period since the 1960s. By the middle of the decade he had written three new plays, a film script for The Crucible, which began shooting in late 1995, and a novella published as Homely Girl, in the United States, and Plain Girl, in the United Kingdom. He continued to monitor the political situation, writing articles to The New York Times, supporting censored and imprisoned writers and traveling widely. He was, in other words, what he had been for the previous five decades, an active participant in theatrical, political, and social life.

He began the decade with a new play. In 1991 he opened The Ride Down Mount Morgan in London, a choice in part determined by the director’s availability but in part by a deepening despair over Broadway’s decline and in particular the determining power of money, whether that related to production costs or the unwillingness of actors to desert Hollywood for New York.

Epic serves as a bright star towards whose seemingly steadfast light many Romantic poets aspire. And yet Romantic poetry thrives on transformations of genre, on a remodelling of past works in the interests of new, often hybridized forms, resulting in what, borrowing a phrase from Wordsworth's Preface to his poems of 1815, Stuart Curran refers to as the 'composite orders' favoured by Romantic poets. A major ingredient in the new generic recipes produced by Romantic poets, epic is understood by Romantic practitioners and theorists to be a genre marked by its width, inclusiveness, openness - and also by its virtual unattainability in its purest form. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley defines the epic poet as a poet 'the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political condition of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it: developing itself in correspondence with their development'. If this complex formulation allows for epic to be regarded as a form that evolves historically, it also serves as an evaluative way of putting the case. To deserve the 'title of epic in its highest sense' (p. 692), Shelley, in effect, asserts, a poem must display an original, renewing creativity which, at this point at least, he ascribes to Homer and Dante, but finds wanting in - among other famous examples of epic - the Aeneid and The Faerie Queene.

In some ways Miller seemed out of synch with the sixties. Rather than writing about Vietnam or civil rights, he chose to look back to the Depression in The Price, the Holocaust in After the Fall and Incident at Vichy, McCarthyism and the Depression in After the Fall. Yet all three plays also explore the problem of denial, and to Miller this was the central issue of the moment. Denial, after all, lay behind the American attitude toward race, and it facilitated the waging of an immoral war in south-east Asia. There is certainly no evidence that he abstracted himself from the political realities of the decade. Quite the contrary. He became actively involved in the anti-war movement. Yale, the University of Michigan, and even West Point invited him to speak about the war. He had not, however, forgotten about McCarthyism, warning students, at a University of Michigan teach-in, that the FBI, who, he claimed, was sitting among them, would hold them accountable for their actions and even ask them to condemn their present passions in the future. He nevertheless applauded the student protest, calling it “the essential risk of living.” Moreover, he consoled students by telling them that even if their movement did not end in victory, “it should not be the occasion for disillusion, because we must go on groping from one illusion of virtue to another” (Timebends, p. 100). Yet he noted a contrast between the personal nature of the student revolt of the sixties and the more altruistic radicalism of the thirties, the decade that would always be his moral and political touchstone.

During the seventeenth century, the Protestant English epic found its most daring and original expression in Milton's two major epics, Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) and Paradise Regained (1671). In this chapter I examine the generic, political, and religious distinctiveness of the Protestant English epic, especially as it culminated in Milton's epic poems published during the Restoration. This was a period of enormous political and religious hostility and uncertainty for Dissenters like Milton, 'fall'n on evil days' and anxious that his might be 'an age too late' to raise the 'name' of epic to new heights (PL 7.25, 9.44-5). In discussing Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and the striking ways in which Milton as visionary poet revises and subverts the epic tradition, I will concentrate on what makes them especially distinctive radical Protestant epics. Although Milton's spiritual epics, with their expansive and highly nuanced handling of biblical materials, remain at the centre of this discussion, Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder, another notable biblical epic by a Dissenter committed to republican causes and initially published anonymously in 1679, deserves special attention as well: the first English Protestant epic by a female author, it is only now beginning to receive critical assessment.