A View From The Bridge....
...worked in the Brooklyn shipyards for two years, where he befriended the Italians he worked alongside. He heard a story of some men coming over to work illegally and being betrayed. The story inspired ‘A View from the Bridge‘, which was written in 1950s but set in late 1940s.
The play is set in Red Hook, New York, Alfieri quotes “The slum that faces the bay on the seaward side of Brooklyn Bridge…the gullet of New York, swallowing the tonnage of the world“-the neighbourhood is very dangerous, it seems like a lawless place. Most of the people in the community are longshoremen working on docks( some legally and some illegally).
The neighbourhood has had a very bad and unforgettable past, Alfieri also quotes “oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjustly men” and tells us about two Italian gangsters, Al Capone and Frankie Yale ’ “Frankie Yale himself was cut precisely in half by a machine gun” and Alfieri says ”I no longer keep a pistol in my filing cabinet” Alfieri and the community has experienced a terrible time but the sense of danger is with them no more.
The play was originally one act in verse but Arthur Miller changed it to two acts in prose to enhance the audience appeal. Miller wanted to write a play in a modern version of a Greek Tragedy( a tragedy features individuals who become enmeshed in a terrible fate), with an ordinary tragic hero( a tragic hero is a central character who is led by fate towards a destiny that cannot be escaped). The play features a lot of loss, sadness and a tragedy always ends with a death no matter what; in this play the central character is Eddie Carbone; he is the protagonist( tragic hero), where then is bound to die.
Alfieri is a lawyer in his late fifties turning gray; he is portly, good humoured and thoughtful. The play is opened with Alfieri’s law suite, who sets the scene. He tells us he has a...
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