Strange Stage Fellows? Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter

Abstract The body of critical literature concerned with direct comparison between the drama of Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter divides into two contradictory threads. The older, larger thread sees the work of Miller and Pinter as stylistic and intellectual antonyms for one another, an argument grounded in Pinter's early identification with Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) and Absurdism's rejection of the kind of dramatic realism and linguistic coherence associated with Miller's best-known works. More recently a small number of critics have introduced a counter thread of interpretations, exploring the means by which Miller and Pinter represent in selected plays similar political, historical, or sociological ideas. This essay takes inspiration from this later thread, presenting a comparison of similarities between Death of a Salesman's Willy Loman and The Homecoming's Max. The article specifically addresses Willy and Max's self-conferral of a bogus ancestral patriarchic authority over their respective households—an authority that is entirely at odds with the actual conditions of their lives.