SOURCE: Tees, Arthur T. “Legal and Poetic Justice in Maxwell Anderson's Plays.” North Dakota Quarterly 38, no. 1 (winter 1970): 25-31.

In the following essay, Tees notes that although Anderson's characters rarely find justice within the American legal system, they do achieve poetic justice outside of it.

Maxwell Anderson was frequently interested in the problem of justice in his plays. Eleven of his thirty-one Broadway productions were directly concerned with justice inside and outside the courtroom. In only one of these eleven, however, is there any optimism that legal procedures can bring justice; the characters in the remaining ten plays find justice outside but not inside the courtroom. Legal injustice and poetic justice are the rule in Anderson's plays.

Anderson's attitude toward the different kinds of justice—that dispensed by the courts and that found elsewhere in life—is summarized in a passage from Anne of the Thousand Days. The ill-fated...