Edith J. R. Isaacs reviews Sherwood's style and language, linking it to the success of the play.
Abe Lincoln in Illinois says what all Sherwood's other serious plays and serious prefaces have tried to say, and says it so well and so convincingly that audiences rise to their feet to applaud it. Much of Abe Lincoln is in Lincoln's own words his homely phrases, his anecdotes, his famous speeches; but the play is none the less Sherwood's creation. He has so immersed himself in Lincoln's style of simple, direct, rugged speech that you pass from Sherwood's words to Lincoln's with no sense of change. Every speech is in character as Sherwood has recreated Lincoln, and within that character a great man, a national hero with all of a nation's legend behind him, lives and moves as.....
