Both Your Houses Essay | Critical Essay #3

Both Your Houses Critical Essay #3

In the following essay excerpt, Shivers surveys the political terrain in Both Your Houses and Anderson's technique in rendering it.

Both Your Houses (note the Shakespearean echo) exists in two complete versions - the 1933 published one which we shall look at first, and the 1939 unpublished one. These two versions illustrate Anderson's changing attitude toward democracy and the possibilities of individual fulfillment. Barrett Clark and George Freedley praise. Both Your Houses as "the first play of any moment written by an American that dealt exclusively or largely with political crookedness in the federal government"; but its main predecessor seems to have been Harrison G. Rhodes and Thomas A. Wise's A Gentleman from Mississippi (1908) which was also concerned with the loading of a Congressional appropriation bill with graft.

Both Your Houses reached the stage of the Royale Theatre on March 6,...
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