SOURCE: Stout, Janis P. “Re-Visions of Job: J. B. and ‘A Masque of Reason’.” Essays in Literature 14, no. 2 (fall 1987): 225-39.

In the following essay, Stout compares MacLeish's verse play J. B. and Robert Frost's dramatic poem “A Masque of Reason” as modern re-compositions of the biblical Book of Job.

The hurrahs were repeated, drowning the faint organ notes. Jude's face changed more: he whispered slowly, his parched lips scarcely moving:

‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’

(‘Hurrah!’)

—Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

The Book of Job is one of those monumental texts that evoke allusions in great numbers, so that we seem to encounter them at every turn, from Herman Melville to Neil Simon.¹ Thomas Carlyle pronounced it unsurpassed by anything either in the Bible or outside it. All this might not...