[Arden has] attained little commercial success and seems to be stuck with the reputation of being a "difficult" dramatist. The reasons may lie more in the stereotyped expectations of his audiences than in his stagecraft. His characters descend directly from comedy and melodrama, although he undercuts their reality at the same time that he depicts it. While his plots are as intricate and confused as those of Jonson, reflecting the moral chaos of his fictional societies, they are easy to follow. Even when his language reflects illiteracies as in Live Like Pigs (1958) or sixteenth-century Scots dialect in Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964), his idiom is firmly sinewed and authentic. The surface of his plays is suffused with the joys of gaming, irruptions of lyricism, and dancelike exuberance. Yet the reality below appears stubbornly resistant to change, even corrupt. (p. 107)

[Unlike Brecht, with whom he has been linked, Arden] is extremely...