Love and Intrigue: A Bourgeois Tragedy

Abstract

him any degree of systematic reflection. It has become a convention of some recent studies on this play to look beyond its social statement — despite our outrage at the sale of soldiers or our admiration for Miller and his bold stand against Walter — and to see in it patterns that are at bottom philosophical or even theological. Why is the world ordained as it is? Who is responsible? On the one hand, Ferdinand believes — Luise too — that theirs is a love preordained by God, a ‘heaven’ (Luise uses this word to Lady Milford), a paradisiac state free of social bonds and convections, an encapsulated existence with its own terms of reference, like Romeo and Juliet’s, if one will.