Tragedy?

Abstract

Like Death of a Salesman, The Crucible aspires to tragedy, Frank Granville Barker remarks on its atmosphere of‘tragic horror’and its ‘Hellenic inevitability’ (Plays and Players, May 1954). Bernard Levin puns on Aristotle’s Poetics: it ‘tells with terror and pitilessness the story of one of the most terrible and pitiless aberrations mankind has ever suffered’ (Daily Mail, 20 Jan. 1965). To John Gassner, Proctor has greater tragic stature than Willy Loman, and his death ‘is on an obviously higher level of tragic sacrifice than Willy’s suicide’ (in Ferres). Even John Simon, who repeatedly savages Death of a Salesman, applauds the later play, accepting as psychologically and dramatically valid the relationship between Proctor’s self-recognised guilt in ‘a minor, expiated transgression’ and his innocence in ‘a major, social context’, the former making him vulnerable to attacks concerning the latter, and he calls Proctor ‘both an Aristotelian hero complete with hamartia and a Freudian hero made incomplete by a nagging sense of guilt’ (New York, 15 May 1972).