J.B. : a play in verse

'...It is Job who asks most poignantly for all mankind the crucial question: How can the world be justified? How, if the world is what we see, can its creator be just? How, if God is just, can God be the creator of the world?...Our generation is one which has felt the stab of Job's question more than most, for ours is a generation in which human suffering has seemed more gross and brutal and senseless than in other times...It is understandable that a poet of our generation, seeking a metaphor for such a time, should have turned to the myth and Book of Job. In MacLeish's J.B. two broken-down actors, reduced to selling popcorn and balloons in a circus, venture to exercise their rusty talents to reinflate their egos by reading the parts of God and Satan after closing time on a side-show stage where others, it appears, have played the play of Job before them...The justification of the injustice of the universe is not, in this play, our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our blinder acceptance of the existance of the world because the world exists. The justification of the injustice of the universe is our love, in spite of everything, for God: our love of life in spite of life. Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. And love is a free gift or it is nothing. And love is most itself, most free, when it is freely given in spite of suffering and of injustice and of death.'

Hardcover