SOURCE: Worster, David. “How to Do Things with Salesmen: David Mamet's Speech-Act Play.” Modern Drama 37, no. 3 (fall 1994): 375-90.

In the following essay, Worster examines the characters in Glengarry Glen Ross, their discussions about speech, and what their conversations reveal about their respective social status.

Stanley Fish once called Coriolanus Shakespeare's speech-act play, because it is “about speech acts [and] the rules of their performance. … It is also about what the theory is about, language and its power.”¹ If Coriolanus is Shakespeare's speech-act play, then Glengarry Glen Ross is David Mamet's, for many of the same reasons. The ideological world of Mamet's play is not the legal institution of Roman law, but rather the economic institution of American capitalism (mythologized as the American Dream), within which Mamet's characters are constituted as salesmen, pivotal figures in the economic world of business. The institution has already predetermined how the salesmen will...