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  The Divine Reason of Speech: Classical Theories of Language From the very earliest days of classical history, language was recognised as perhaps the most singularly significant factor which defined human beings as distinct from the animal kingdom.  The Greek rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 bc) argued: In most of out abilities we differ not at all from the animals; we are in fact behind many in swiftness and strength and other resources.  But because there is born in us the power to persuade each other and to show ourselves whatever we wish, we not only have escaped from living as brutes, but also by coming together have founded cities and set up laws and invented arts, and speech has helped us attain practically all of the things we have devised.  For it is speech that has made laws about justice and injustice and honor and disgrace, without which provisions we should not be able to live together.  By speech we refute the wicked and praise the good....

Throug hout the twentieth cent u ry, we can see a consistent degradation America’s own view of itself, through the work of the playwrights studied. Its dreams and idealisms have, for these playwrights, fallen down around them. The Depression destroyed the dreams of economic security and the confidence in capitalism. The McCarthy trials destroyed faith in American democracy, and its position as a ‘land of the free’ was challenged by those who pointed out the vast inequalities sustained by so-called American ideals.  Playwright’s responded to these various set-backs in a variety of ways. Some like Clifford Odets wrote plays designed to act as clarion calls: calls for social reform, as idealistic and as optimistic as those of the Founding Fathers. Others, like Tennessee Williams, responded with despondency, presenting a world of decayed values in which the individual soul was irretrievably lost amid the confused jockeying of societies...