A view from a bridge work book Essay

Dear Miss Fisher, I have finished reading a view from a bridge & put notes on the power point sheets however I then looked back on it & realised it was illegible! So I wrote it up here, is that ok I’m sorry for the inconvenience, & it won’t happen again. Sorry again, Daisy 🙂 A view from the bridge. 15th September. Research tasks: Who was Arthur Miller? Find autobiographical information about the playwright. Arthur Miller, playwright from New York, became a journalist, worked with Italian immigrants during WWII. Which gave him an outlook Into the Sicilian dreams & inspiration for â€Å"A View From The Bridge. † Miller’s first play flopped, but his second; â€Å"All My Sons† was a massive success. He divorced his first wife in 1961 & married Marilyn Munroe, the reason for this is unknown as apparently they were never really in love & divorced in 1963, it is thought Monroe married him for intelligence & milled married Monroe for beauty, Miller then wrote a play â€Å"After The Fall† that is thought to be based on their relationship. Miller died in 2005. Which other plays has Arthur miller written? Do they have any common themes? â€Å"After The Fall†, â€Å"The Prince†, â€Å"The Archbishop’s Ceiling†, â€Å"The Clock†, â€Å"Broken Glass†, â€Å"All My Sons†, â€Å"Death Of A Salesman†, â€Å"Crucible†. A common theme of Arthur Miller’s play was the examining of an individual in relation to their authority; this means the plays are often considered political. Where is Brooklyn? What was it like in the 1940’s? Who lived & worked there? What sort of environment was it? What’s it like now? Brooklyn is a borough of New York; in the 1940s it had a large Italian population due to the ports near the bridge. Brooklyn was split in two it had the middle class areas such as Flatbush & working class areas like Red Hook, the setting for â€Å"A View The Bridge. † In the mid to late 1940s Brooklyn was enjoying a good period the gang violence was, all though easily noticed, small. As Brooklyn reached the end of the 1940s the borough began a period of decline & by the early 1950s gangsters were ripe & until the 1980s it was classed as a bad place to live. People from all over Europe lived & worked in Brooklyn it also had a large African-American community. Brooklyn now has a safer & cleaner track record with very little gang violence & a large business district the 3rd largest in New York State. Which groups of people immigrated to the United States in the 1940’s? What was life like for them when they arrived? The main groups of people immigrating to the United States in the 1940s were European, particularly Italians & Russians. When they first arrived life would be tough they would usually leave their homelands with nothing & have to find jobs & work quickly so they could live out their own â€Å"American Dream†. Find out as much as you can about Italian-American communities†¦ Which television programmes & films include Italian-American characters? How do they talk? Is this community stereotyped? What values can you identify in this community? The most famous film on Italian-Americans would probably be â€Å"Scarface† a movie based on Italian-American gangster Al Capone, the Italian-American community is stereotyped as a very tight family, which it represents in gangs or mobs, the Italian-American dialect is varied through out Brooklyn, Bugs Bunny has an accent based on the Flatbush dialect. Wikipedia – â€Å"Italian Americans are higher in the rate & degree of the tensing & rising of (oh) & (aeh) than that of Jewish American New Yorkers. † The values of the communities of Italian Americans seem as though they all run everything as a family business, & a tight knit friendship group. What is a ‘tragedy’? Find out the main features or conventions of this type of play. Make sure you go right back to Greek tragedy. A Greek tragedy is a form of art portraying human suffering causing audience pleasure this form has been modernised to usually end a play in a death where all characters end in despair, or worse off than they were at the beginning. Alfieri’s first speech. What have we learnt about the people who live in Red Hook? We have learnt from the opening speech from Alfieri that Red Hook was the slum of Brooklyn & the gullet of New York, Red Hook is portrayed as very violent with no care for the law, but it is now ore civilised & getting better, people are no longer as scared as they were, as Alfieri says: â€Å"I no longer feel the need to keep a gun† It shows Red Hook at one time was extremely intimidating & bad but now much better. Alfieri goes onto mention how his relatives often tell him not to get involved with cases, this shows the Italian-American-tight knit-family-like-ness & how his business seems to be everyone’s business. What does Alfieri mean when he says â€Å"justice is very important† here? When Alfieri says â€Å"justice is very important here† he is using a bit of sarcasm he is commenting on how people do feel justice is important but their own personal justice not the government’s justice. & How people can commit murder believing it is all right because of there own justice. However you feel a sense of irony as he is a lawyer speaking & he is discussing justice that he may well deal with in court. The fact he is a lawyer also shows there is work for lawyers in Red Hook so some sort of governed justice is important. Now the people â€Å"settle for half† instead of using a gun for justice, what does that mean? Alfieri’s comment â€Å"now the people settle for half† is commenting on now that Red Hook has been cleaned up a bit his services a called on more & although it means the person against the allegations may not be killed he will be brought to governed justice & possible face prison. Eddie’s story is not like the ‘petty troubles of the poor. ‘ Why might he come to see Alfieri? Eddie’s story is not like the petty troubles of the poor because we realise through out the book that aside from the immigrants in his house being illegal, they have actually done nothing wrong & although his allegations against Rodolfo being gay are also wrong, it is not illegal to be gay. Alfieri also deals mainly in family squabbles, evictions & compensation cases, but Eddie’s is different because it’s more about jealousy & revenge.