“Of traditional tragedy, MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN retains the sense of overriding fate, the sheer inevitability…Though her name is an irony, and she is, in the first instance, a coward, she also, in the last analysis, needs courage---needs it merely to continue, merely to exist, and this courage is there—inside her—when she looks for it. A human being, she has human resources…With the same good right as the aristocratic Rilke, Mother Courage can say: “Who talks of victories? To see it through is everything.’”

Eric Bentley