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 (1984), Arthur Miller's threat of legal action eventually forced the project to be withdrawn from the stage.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.”

Since his first Broadway success, commercial filmmakers have shown great interest in the works, especially the plays, of Arthur Miller. An impressive number of cinematic versions, intended for both theatrical and televisual release, have been produced. As I write this piece, a second film of The Crucible, for which the playwright himself wrote the screenplay, is in production, indicating the lasting appeal, especially of his early plays, to filmmakers. Such enthusiasm is neither surprising nor exceptional. Driven by a need for quality material with proven popularity, the cinema is eager to produce screen versions of the writings of successful authors, a group of which Miller is one of the most distinguished current members. The resulting films pose a difficult, if interesting problem for the critic. On the one hand, they belong indirectly to the oeuvre of the original author; they are versions of his works and thus merit attention in a book such as the present one.

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 1938 and 1943.

It has become almost a cliché among historians of our century to say that, although once dismissed by the likes of Macaulay as a trivial spat confined to literary folk (a mere Battle of the Books), the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns (as it was named by Hippolyte Rigault in his Histoire de la Querelle of 1859) was in fact a watershed - that in the Moderns' rejection of the authority of the Ancients, their texts, and the rules drawn from them, we can locate the birthplace not only of eighteenth-century criticism but of modern thought. In 1920 J. B. Bury (following the lead of French scholars) identified the seventeenth-century Quarrel, especially the works of Fontenelle, as the site where ‘the first clear assertions of a doctrine of progress in knowledge were provoked’, making possible the full-scale theories of human progress of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Turgot, and Condorcet, which Bury found characteristic of the period. In parallel with Bury, Richard Foster Jones began an inquiry into the background of the English Battle of the Books, which resulted in his thesis that with their rejection of the Ancients' doctrines of authority, imitation, and degeneration, the Moderns - preeminently Bacon and his puritan followers - produced the activity we know as modern experimental science; in the process, Jones sought to establish both that the Quarrel was not solely a ‘literary’ matter, and that its origins were not in the France of Descartes and Fontenelle but in England.

It is a truism that no book was more copiously studied and written about in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century than the Bible. The connections between biblical scholarship and literary criticism in the period are multiple and complex, the more so in that many debates about central literary theoretical questions took place within the numerous spheres of biblical discussion, rather than in works of secular literary criticism. This was inevitably the case; at the Restoration secular literary criticism in England was from some points of view in its infancy. There had been no full and systematic theory of poetry since the late sixteenth century, no extended critical analysis or scholarly edition of any English classic. The idea of a secular literary history would begin to take shape only in the eighteenth century.

I shall discuss in this essay, chiefly but not exclusively with reference to the work of British writers, two key themes: the development of appreciation and analysis of the Bible as a literary work, and of its poetic, aesthetic, and rhetorical qualities; and, at least as important to the history of literary criticism, the debates of biblical scholars about the textual and hermeneutic issues raised by the Holy Scriptures. The two themes are not unrelated.

With the possible exception of historians of the sublime, scholars rarely compare the contemporaneous contributions of Shaftesbury and Addison to eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics. Despite considerable overlap between the political and literary circles in which they worked and travelled, there appears to be no direct biographical connection. There are major differences of focus, tone, subject-matter, and intellectual temperament in their work. Shaftesbury, whose three-volume collection of essays, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, was published in 1711, seems to address himself to fellow gentlemen virtuosi; while Addison, whose writing appears largely in The Tatler and The Spectator, addresses the audience 'in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses' Yet the critical enterprises of Shaftesbury and Addison and their efforts to define a role for the critic have much in common, especially in so far as each is concerned with ‘the public taste’.

Shaftesbury, perhaps most ostentatiously, played critic to himself in the Miscellaneous Reflections he published on his own treatises in the Characteristicks. He creates a commentator to act as ‘critic and interpreter to this new writer’ (II, p. 161); but, describing his goals in his essay, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, Shaftesbury writes of himself: ‘His pretence has been to advise authors and polish styles, but his aim has been to correct manners and regular lives. He has affected soliloquy, as pretending only to censure himself, but he has taken occasion to bring others into his company’ (II, p. 2, 72). This aim is consistent with Addison's critical and journalistic enterprise.

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.

Ideas about poetry changed almost completely during his time, Sainte-Beuve wrote in 1866: the poetic ideal of a ‘most finished and beautiful work, the most clear and pleasant to read’ had given way to the desire for a poetry offering ‘the greatest latitude to [its] reader to imagine and to dream’. Quoting him Margaret Gilman noted that between the beginning of the eighteenth century and Sainte-Beuve's time ‘the conception of poetry changed from that of embellished statement to “suggestive magic”, to use Baudelaire's phrase’. ‘Merely decorative allegorization’, as Paul de Man pointed out, using the terms of Wordsworth's reproach to Pope, came at the end of the eighteenth century to be seen as inferior to the ‘imaginative use of figural diction. Meanwhile the term imagination steadily [grew] in importance and complexity in the critical as well as in the poetic texts of the period’. A ‘profound change in the texture of poetic diction’, often taking the form of greater concreteness, was paradoxically accompanied by the increasingly metaphorical structure of poetic language and ‘the image – be it under the name of symbol or even of myth – [came] to be considered as the most prominent dimension of the style’.

French literary criticism of the second half of the eighteenth century manifests a tension between, on the one hand, an uncompromising neoclassicism in its most characteristic dogmas and, on the other, frequent expressions of opinion that sound very unclassical. Some of the most original literature of the period is ‘pre-romantic’ in both subject and manner.

Whilst recognizing the need to avoid crude evolutionary formulas, a volume of this kind must chart broad patterns and large-scale movements of thought. It is therefore a useful simplification, rather than a savage caricature, to describe the development of theorizing about literary style in this period as following a fairly steady progression. At the end of the seventeenth century, the prime centre of influence in European criticism remained France. Equally, the main attention still concentrated on epic and, to a slightly lesser extent, tragedy. Stylistic issues were derivative from broader moral questions about the import and bearing of a text, conceived as an exemplary and instructive (if not always precisely didactic) statement. In this phase of critical history, poetic language was not the heart of poetics – rather an instrument of a higher ordonnance which privileged doctrine and form.

All this is true despite the fact that the greatest practising critic of the later seventeenth century was an Englishman, John Dryden, who was himself a great master of language and a thinker about literature with no excessive reverence for neo-Aristotelian pieties. It is also true despite the fact that the famous quarrel of Ancients and Moderns dominated the last decade of the century, and here the Moderns seemed ready to overturn those traditional pieties which included a ranking of elocutio well beneath inventio and even dispositio. It is true despite the fact that Boileau himself had translated Longinus in 1674 and begun the meteoric ascent of ‘sublimity’ as a critical watchword.

French: to 1700

With one of those left-handed compliments that are often directed across the English Channel Dryden in his Dedication of the Aeneid, 1697, candidly concedes that, ‘impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English, as they are worse poets’; he calls Le Bossu ‘the best of modern critics’, allows the critical writings of Boileau and Rapin to be ‘the greatest of this age’, and speaks respectfully of Bouhours and Saint-Évremond (Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, I, pp. 2.46, 199, II, pp. 56-8).

The Traité du poème éepique (1675) of René Le Bossu (1631-89) provided for its period the most authoritative modern treatise on what, it was generally agreed, was the highest genre of poetry. Le Bossu shares the neo-classical view that poetry was brought to perfection by the ancients, ‘therefore they who practise afterwards the same art are obliged to tread in their footsteps, and to search in their writings the foundation of them; for it is not just that new rules should destroy the authority of the old’ (Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, I, p. 246). Le Bossu's moderate tone, more judicious than judicial, appealed to the scientific temper of his age. The anonymous English translator of the Traité in 1695 said of him:

Writers in the eighteenth century had much to say about the relative status of the general and the particular, but if one were simply to summarize their views on this topic, the complications and contradictions would seem exasperating if not inexplicable. To make sense of what is going on, one has to recognize that in this instance a literary-critical question is inseparable from a philosophical one, and also that discussions of it usually carry a polemical charge.

Modern accounts of the topic have until recently been shaped by the assumptions of mid-twentieth-century poetics. Reneé Wellek wrote in 1955:

In this formulation, a critic like Samuel Johnson (whose words Wellek is quoting) is understood to be a devotee of ‘the neoclassical ideal’, in which the universal is equated with the abstract, and is opposed to the concrete and visual which ‘we’, together with certain ‘preromantic’ critics, prefer.

Such an account seriously misrepresents Johnson in a way that is symptomatic of the New Critical recension of Romantic aesthetics, and that continues to colour accounts of the eighteenth century. Now that New Critical assumptions are fading into the past, however, it is possible to address the question more dispassionately.

The natural point at which to begin a discussion of eighteenth-century theories of language is John Locke's 1690 Essay concerning Human Understanding. Virtually every theorist of language and literature over the next century owed something to Book 3 in Locke's Essay, ‘Of Words’. Locke's influence was not, however, to popularize any single doctrine. There were, in fact, two major interpretations of Locke's theory of language, each leading to a quite different conception of its nature and history. The first interpretation looked no deeper than Locke's explicit statements that words were merely arbitrary ‘signs’ of ideas. The second interpretation took inspiration from Locke's unclear but challenging suggestions that words were much more than outward signs, but had a fundamental role in the formation of ideas and their organization in rational thought. These provocative insights into the mental function of language led to the theories of Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, Herder and other philosophers of the mid- and late eighteenth century. These authors would argue that the history of literature had been closely connected with the joint evolution of language and reason.

The ‘arbitrary sign’ and its literary implications

Locke's name is now closely associated with the doctrine that words ‘signify only Men's peculiar Ideas, and that by a perfectly arbitrary Imposition’. Impelled by their natural sociability, argued Locke, the first humans invented ‘external sensible Signs’ to communicate their ‘invisible Ideas’ to others. Locke's insistence that words refer only to ideas in the mind of the speaker, and not to ‘things’ in the world, corrected the habit of many seventeenth-century grammarians and philosophers of using the terms ‘idea’ and ‘thing’ almost interchangeably: Locke's admirers were more careful to specify that words referred only to thoughts in the mind of the speaker, and not to physical objects.

The debate in the classical era: roman and nouvelle

Introduction

Fictional prose narratives of several types were popular in France throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Some have always been called rotnans, the standard word for the English term ‘novel’. The history of the French novel therefore begins in the early medieval period; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the genre achieved new prominence and stature. A serious critical discourse on the novel existed in France well before 1670. Romans - especially those of d'Urfé, Gomberville, La Calprenède, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry - were discussed in the salons, in authors' prefaces, and even in writings by scholars and academicians like Chapelain, Ménage, Segrais, Boileau, Furetière, and Huet.

A different but equally significant concern for the theory and practice of fiction appears in French imitations of Cervantes's Don Quixote (translated in 1614) by writers such as Charles Sorel and Paul Scarron. Spain also introduced France to the novela, a shorter and less exotic genre than the heroic rotnans. Early translations and imitations emphasized the verisimilitude of the new form; Segrais's Nouvelles françoises (1656) stated succinctly a key problem for theorists of the novel: ‘the difference between the Roman and the Nouvelle [is] that the Roman writes things as propriety wishes them and in the manner of a poet; but the Nouvelle must take a bit more from History, and try rather to give the images of things as we ordinarily see them happen, than as our imagination figures them’ (I, p. 146).

After nearly five decades of writing for the theatre, Arthur Miller continues to have new plays produced on New York and London stages, and the number of revivals of his plays increases annually in professional and academic theatres where they reinvigorate American audiences and enthrall international ones. “No other American dramatist,” writes C. W. E. Bigsby, “has so directly engaged the anxieties and fears, the myths and dreams, of a people desperate to believe in a freedom for which they see ever less evidence. No other American writer has so successfully touched a nerve of the national consciousness” (A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol. n [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 248). Best known for his stage plays, Miller has also made important contributions to dramatic theory and criticism, and he has written radio and television plays, film scripts, novels, and travel journals. In addition, Miller continues to extend his political activities beyond the stage as he fights for the freedom of artists worldwide. His work still provokes scholarly debate.

Primitivism may be defined as the idealization of a way of life that differs from our own in being less complicated, less polished, and less self-aware. It may be found in an abstract state of nature, in the countryside where the influence of the city and the court has not been felt, in some land distant from the corruptions of western Europe, or in the historical past. The most important critical debates associated with primitivism during the period between 1660 and 1800 involved a spectrum of positions which were intimately connected with political and social attitudes, and isolating the aesthetic from these contexts is neither possible nor useful. In England, the return of Charles II entailed a rejection of the past – literary as well as political – as a time of barbarism. In some ways, the defacing of the bodies of Oliver Cromwell and the regicides had its counterpart in the criticism of Thomas Rymer, who treated Shakespeare and his contemporaries as writers who knew nothing about art or decorum. The ‘last age’ was to make way for a time of order, control, and polish in both politics and poetry.

Despite some notable exceptions, primitivism, when presented as an unmitigated ideal, functioned in the realm of criticism the same way as it operated in politics. It was invoked by those offering views of art and life that appealed to innovation and freedom. Although the main focus of this discussion will be upon critical debates over what might be considered primitive art forms, poetic figures, and language, none of this is intelligible without a brief discussion of the phenomenon of primitivism itself and its appearance in contemporary literature.