As time has passed, Maxwell Anderson has been best remembered for the plays he wrote in verse, which attempted to revive a lost art. When he was writing, he was generally associated with the social focus of his plays, although his reputation as a social critic has not held up as well as the reputations of other playwrights. At one time, for example, Anderson was considered almost an equal of Eugene O’Neill, who also satirized the modern social order and drew from theater’s rich history; now, O’Neill’s works are performed much more often than Anderson’s. Because political issues change, Both Your Houses could be expected to lose relevance as time goes by, but critics still consider it fondly, even though they do not write about it as one of Anderson’s major works.

When it was first performed, the play was considered timely, ground-breaking material. In 1933, Barrett H. Clark gave this assessment of its importance: ‘‘Both Your Houses is perhaps more important for the direction that it takes than as an actual achievement: it is, I believe, the first American play concerned exclusively and seriously with federal political intrigue.’’ Whether or not Clark was right, satire of the complex government system was rare enough at that time that it deserved mention—a concept that might seem quaint to modern readers who are used to seeing the government ridiculed.

Since literary critics concentrated on Anderson’s historical plays and his experiments with verse, Both Your Houses was generally neglected. Because Anderson was an important writer, long studies of his career were eventually published, and these usually included a few notes about the play, although they did not examine it in depth as they did works like High Tor and Winterset. Mabel Driscoll Bailey wrote in her 1957 book Maxwell Anderson: The Playwright As Prophet that it is an ‘‘important’’ play: ‘‘[For] all its serious implications, the play is highly entertaining, not only in the cynical dialogue, but even in the central action in which the hero defeats his own ends by trying to beat his adversaries at their own game of clever manipulation.’’ The importance of Both Your Houses is the aspect that most critics have attached themselves to, although many let its serious subject matter distract them from appreciating its entertainment value.

Finally, some critics have charged that the play does not actually deal with the social issues that it raises because Alan McClean does not, for all of his disgust at the system, have any better alternative to offer. Alfred S. Shivers dismissed the concerns of such critics as unfairly expecting too much of both the playwright and his character, since Anderson could not be expected

to have figured out on short notice what has eluded for centuries the most eminent philosophers, social scien tists, and statesmen. Anyway, no playwright is or should be required to offer a solution to the social problems he presents: it is quite enough to lay forth the problem in an entertaining manner.

It is, in fact, the very insolubility of the situation presented in Both Your Houses that makes the issues outlined in the play relevant to this day.