A View from the Bridge was first produced in 1955 as a one-act play on a double bill with A Memory of Two Mondays and published by Viking Press the same year. Miller revised and expanded it into a two-act version for a 1956 London production directed by Peter Brook, and the two-act version is the one now standard.
Eddie Carbone is an Italian American longshoreman in Red Hook, Brooklyn, who has raised his orphaned niece Catherine since childhood. When two of his wife Beatrice’s cousins — Marco and Rodolpho — arrive illegally from Italy and are sheltered in the Carbone apartment, Catherine falls in love with Rodolpho. Eddie’s opposition is ostensibly protective (Rodolpho is only marrying Catherine for a green card, he insists) but transparently driven by a possessive desire he cannot acknowledge: Eddie is in love with Catherine, though he experiences this forbidden desire as paternal anxiety.
Miller frames the story through Alfieri, a neighborhood lawyer who serves as narrator and chorus. Alfieri sees what is coming — the community’s code of honor forbids informing to the authorities, and Eddie’s inability to relinquish Catherine will drive him to violate this code — but he cannot prevent it. Eddie calls the Immigration Bureau, Marco and Rodolpho are arrested, and Eddie’s betrayal is exposed. Marco, released on bail, confronts Eddie; Eddie demands that Marco restore his “name” (his honor, his standing in the community), and the confrontation ends in Eddie’s death.
The play draws on the conventions of Greek tragedy (Alfieri as chorus, the inexorable movement toward catastrophe, the hero destroyed by a flaw he cannot see) and on the actual social structures of Italian American immigrant communities in mid-century Brooklyn, where the code of omertà — silence in the face of authority — was a genuine social force.
Collecting A View from the Bridge
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1955): Hardcover with dust jacket. Published with A Memory of Two Mondays.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
- Very good: $100–$300
- Signed: $500–$1,200