The Audience's Response to Brady: Mixed Feelings and Complex Characterization Anonymous 10th Grade

Upon viewing Inherit the Wind, the audience leaves Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee's play with such a conflict of emotions due to the playwrights’ constant changing of the audience’s perspective on Brady’s character, and through the transformation of his personality from hubris to delusion, and finally to a sense of broken realisation, the audience leaves the play with such a wheel of opinions that it is difficult to interpret Brady’s character as a whole throughout the play. The playwrights convey Brady to the audience, in the first parts of the play, as arrogant and proud; this initial sense of grandiloquence and self-confidence creates an elevated aura about Brady, thus making his fall from greatness all the more pronounced, whilst maximising the contrast of his personality in the former to the latter parts of the play.

The playwrights achieve such effects by creating anticipation to the arrival of Brady through the anxiety and excitement of the townsfolk, manifesting itself in their conversations, such as ‘Imagine. Matthew Harrison Brady comin’ here … I seen him once,’ thus immersing the audience into the townsfolk’s almost godly opinion of Brady, conveyed by the proudness and incredulity of having ‘seen him once.’ Upon his...