The Great White Hope Essay & Criticism

The Great White Hope Critical Overview

Perhaps it is fitting that Howard Sackler achieved such high acclaim with the success of The Great White Hope. Critics were quite impressed when the young playwright produced his treatise on racial hatred, characterizing the plot as a rather fastmoving, yet smoothly flowing entity as it seamlessly transitions from one scene to the next. The work is crafted in the tradition of a great Shakespearean play, the text written in flowing verse, the main character firmly grounded, central to all of the action swirling around him. Every event in the play either directly or indirectly relates to Jack's life. In Western Humanities Review, Marion Trousdale comments on this centrality, calling it "irreducibly dramatic." States Trousdale, "[the play] did what Aristotle said a play should do, and what few playwrights know how to do—it imitated an action by means of an action." Therefore, the critic adds, the play has a "histrionic...
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