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A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller
This guide is written for teachers and students who are studying Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge. The guide is written specifically for students in the UK, but I hope it may be helpful to users from other parts of the world.

Introduction
This guide is written to help you, but is no substitute for knowing the text. Either read this toyourself, as you would a prose work (it is quite short) or read it aloud. If you can get hold of a recorded version you could listen to this, or you could make a recording of some key episodes yourself. Mark your copy of the play with under-linings and bookmarks. The Heinemann edition of the play has a good general introduction, and you should certainly read this. This play can be discussed inmany different ways and some areas you might like to focus on are: character, action, dramatic devices and dramatic structures.

A short history of the play
I am grateful to Nicole de Sapio, who has provided this account. A View from the Bridge has an unusually complicated performance history. It was originally a screenplay called The Hook, written by Miller with assistance from Elia Kazan, whohad previously directed the playwright’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. The script, dealing as it then did with “waterfront corruption and graft” was eventually withdrawn by Miller in response to the Hollywood studio’s complaints that it was un-American (this was, of course, the age of McCarthy – the early 1950s). The Hook’s basic themes would nonetheless resurface in Kazan’s 1954 film, Onthe Waterfront. Inspired now by the true story of a Brooklyn dockworker who informed on two illegal immigrants, Miller reconceived The Hook as A View from the Bridge. The play, a one-act verse drama, was a mild failure on Broadway in 1955; critics found its austere style uninvolving. Miller had wanted to create a play that would simply tell the tale he himself had heard, with no attempt to gainaudience sympathy for Eddie’s – or anyone else’s – plight. Consequently, nothing was allowed onstage that did not directly contribute to the action. But Miller ultimately found that he had created a cold play, rather than a fascinating and suspenseful one. In 1956, A View from the Bridge was revised for a new London production. The verse became prose, the length was expanded to two acts, and thecharacters were allowed to speak more - thus becoming more human and more sympathetic. Whilst we may not identify with the Eddie Carbone of the final version, we are better able to understand what motivates him and therefore to sympathize with his basic dilemma: how to ‘let go’ of the niece he has raised and loved as a daughter. As Miller writes in his introduction to the published revision: ‘EddieCarbone is still not a man to weep over ... But it is more possible now to relate his actions to our own and thus to understand
Originally published on www.universalteacher.org.uk, Andrew Moore’s teaching resource site. This free PDF version is available from www.teachit.co.uk. © Andrew Moore, 1999-2005.

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ourselves a little better, not only as isolated psychological entities, but as weconnect to our fellows and our long past together.’

Eddie Carbone: a representative type
Western drama originates in the Greek tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, all of whom wrote in Athens in the 5th century B.C. Drama, theatre, actor and tragedy are all Greek words. In these plays the tragic hero or protagonist (first or most important actor) commits an offence, often unknowingly.He must then learn his fault, suffer and perhaps die. In this way, the gods are vindicated and the moral order of the universe restored. (This is a gross simplification of an enormous subject.) These plays, and those of Shakespeare two thousand years later, are about kings, dukes or great generals. Why? Because in their day, these individuals were thought to embody or represent the whole people....