Language

Abstract

Some critics charge Miller with what John Simon calls ‘linguistic insufficiency’, concocting ‘a pidgin-Colonial to make your eardrums buckle’ (New York, 15 May 1972). For the most part, however, appraisals tend to agree with Julius Novick’s, that the dialogue ‘feels’ historically accurate and ‘can rise at times to a considerable level of eloquence’ (Village Voice, 4 May 1972). English reviewers were more fulsome in their praise of the play’s language before their American colleagues were. T. C. Worsley, who called Death of a Salesman ‘Poetry without Words’, applauded the language of The Crucible, ‘which very successfully places us in the past without being either awkwardly archaic or falsely poetic’ (New Statesman and Nation, 20 Nov. 1954). Kenneth Tynan admired the ‘mastery of period dialogue. The prose is gnarled, whorled in its gleaming as a stick of polished oak’ (Observer, 14 Nov. 1954).