The Emperor Jones | Theatrical Elements in The Emperor Jones
Nienhuis is a Ph.D. specializing in modern and contemporary drama. In this essay he discusses the theatrical elements in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.
The critical enthusiasm for O’Neill’s drama has always been tempered by a recognition that he was limited as a writer. As his foremost biographer, Louis Sheaffer, put it in O’Neill: Son and Playwright, ‘‘of all the major playwrights, O’Neill is, with little doubt, the most uneven. During the larger part of his career . . . he kept producing, almost alternately, good plays and bad.’’ And even O’Neill’s good plays sometimes seem to display his major faults: he is often melodramatic, clumsy and heavyhanded with dialogue, unpoetic in his use of language, obsessed...
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