Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can variously describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or, often, a serious play with a happy ending.^[1]

Tragicomedy in theatre[link]

Classical precedent[link]

Tragic Comic Masks of Ancient Greek Theatre represented in the Hadrian's Villa mosaic.

There is no complete formal definition of tragicomedy from the classical age. It appears that the Greek Philosopher Aristotle had something like the Renaissance meaning of the term (that is, a serious action with a happy ending) in mind when, in Poetics, he discusses tragedy with a dual ending. In this respect, a number of Greek and Roman plays, for instance Alcestis, may be called tragicomedies, though without any definite attributes outside of plot. The word itself originates with the Roman comic playwright Plautus, who coined the term somewhat facetiously in the prologue to his play Amphitryon. The character Mercury, sensing the indecorum of the inclusion of both kings and gods alongside servants in a comedy, declares that the play had better be a "tragicomoedia:"^[2]

Renaissance revival[link]

Italy[link]

Plautus's comment had an arguably excessive impact on Renaissance aesthetic theory, which had largely transformed Aristotle's comments on drama into a rigid theory. For "rule mongers" (the term is Giordano Bruno's), "mixed" works such as those mentioned above, more recent "romances" such as Orlando Furioso, and even The Odyssey were at best puzzles; at worst, mistakes. Two figures helped to elevate tragicomedy to the status of a regular genre, by which is meant one with its own set of rigid rules. Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio, in the mid-sixteenth century, both argued that the tragedy-with-comic-ending (tragedia de lieto fin) was most appropriate to modern times and produced his own examples of such plays. Even more important was Giovanni Battista Guarini. Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, published in 1590, provoked a fierce critical debate in which Guarini's spirited defense of generic innovation eventually carried the day. Guarini's tragicomedy offered modulated action that never drifted too far either to comedy or tragedy, mannered characters, and a pastoral setting. All three became staples of continental tragicomedy for a century and more.

England[link]

In England, where practice ran ahead of theory, the situation was quite different. In the sixteenth century, "tragicomedy" meant the native sort of romantic play that violated the unities of time, place, and action, that glibly mixed high- and low-born characters, and that presented fantastic actions. These were the features Philip Sidney deplored in his complaint against the "mungrell Tragy-comedie" of the 1580s, and of which Shakespeare's Polonius offers famous testimony: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men." Some aspects of this romantic impulse remain even in the work of more sophisticated playwrights: Shakespeare's last plays, which may well be called tragicomedies, have often been called romances.

By the early Stuart period, some English playwrights had absorbed the lessons of the Guarini controversy. John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess, an adaptation of Guarini's play, was produced in 1608. In the printed edition, Fletcher offered an interesting definition of the term, worth quoting at length: "A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie." Fletcher's definition focuses primarily on events: a play's genre is determined by whether or not people die in it, and in a secondary way on how close the action comes to a death. But, as Eugene Waith showed, the tragicomedy Fletcher developed in the next decade also had unifying stylistic features: sudden and unexpected revelations, outré plots, distant locales, and a persistent focus on elaborate, artificial rhetoric.

Some of Fletcher's contemporaries, notably Philip Massinger and James Shirley, wrote successful and popular tragicomedies. Richard Brome also essayed the form, but with less success. And many of their contemporary writers, ranging from John Ford to Lodowick Carlell to Sir Aston Cockayne, made attempts in the genre.

Tragicomedy remained fairly popular up to the closing of the theaters in 1642, and Fletcher's works were popular in the Restoration as well. The old styles were of course cast aside as tastes changed in the eighteenth century; the "tragedy with a happy ending" eventually developed into melodrama, in which form it still flourishes.

Later developments[link]

The more subtle criticism that developed after the Renaissance stressed the thematic and formal aspects of tragicomedy, rather than plot. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing defined it as a mixture of emotions in which "seriousness stimulates laughter, and pain pleasure." Even more commonly, tragicomedy's affinity with satire and "dark" comedy have suggested a tragicomic impulse in modern absurdist drama. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss dramatist, suggested that tragicomedy was the inevitable genre for the twentieth century; he describes his play The Visit (1956) as a tragicomedy. Tragicomedy is a common genre in post-World War II British theatre, with authors as varied as Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter writing in this genre.

See also[link]

• Comedy-drama
• Outrapo
• Schadenfreude
• Theatre of the Absurd

References[link]

External links[link]

• Tragicomedy from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare
• Post-war British drama

Wikiversity has learning materials about Collaborative_play_writing

Samuel Beckett
Beckett in 1977
Born	Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-04-13)13 April 1906 Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland
Died	22 December 1989(1989-12-22) (aged 83) Paris, France
Pen name	Andrew Belis[1]
Occupation	Novelist, playwright, poet, theatre director, essayist
Nationality	Irish
Genres	Drama, fiction, poetry, screenplays
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable work(s)	Murphy (1938) Molloy (1951) Malone Dies (1951) The Unnamable (1953) Waiting for Godot (1953) Watt (1953) Endgame (1957) Krapp's Last Tape (1958) How It Is (1961)
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1969 Croix de Guerre 1945
Influences Alighieri · Geulincx · Joyce · Proust · Racine · Schopenhauer · J.M Synge · Yeats · O'Casey · Wilde · Sade · Descartes · Sterne · Democritus · Milton · Stéphane Mallarmé  · Kant · Berkeley
Influenced Adorno · Albee · Auster · Badiou · Banville · Deleuze · Barthelme · Burroughs · Calvino · Carr · Coetzee · Davis · DeLillo · Dick · Foucault · Havel · Ionesco · Johnson · Kane · Mahon · Mamet · Nauman · Norton · O'Brien · Pettigrew · Pinter · Ruy-Sánchez · Shepard · Stoppard · McCarthy

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.

Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.^[2] Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".^[3] He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

Life and career[link]

Early life and education[link]

The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.^[4]

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906 to William Frank Beckett, a 35 year old Civil Engineer, and May Barclay (also 35 at Beckett's birth); they had married in 1901. Beckett had one older brother, Frank Edward Beckett (born 1902). At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsfort House School in the city centre near Harcourt Street. In 1919, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (which Oscar Wilde had also attended). A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. Later, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire.^[5] As a result, he became the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the "bible" of cricket^[6]

Early writings[link]

Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927 (one of his tutors was the eminent Berkeley scholar A. A. Luce). Beckett graduated with a BA, and—after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast—took up the post of lecteur d'anglais in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked there. This meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake.^[7]

In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". The essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, and was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams). Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia owing to her progressing schizophrenia. Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was published in Jolas's periodical transition. The next year he won a small literary prize with his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws on a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit.

In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer, though he soon became disillusioned with the post. He expressed his aversion by playing a trick on the Modern Language Society of Dublin. Beckett read a learned paper in French on a Toulouse author named Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called Concentrism. Chas and Concentrism, however, were pure fiction, having been invented by Beckett to mock pedantry. When Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was terminated. He commemorated it with the poem "Gnome", which was inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and eventually published in the Dublin Magazine in 1934:

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning^[8]

Beckett travelled in Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical Schopenhauerian study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion, who took him to hear Carl Jung's third Tavistock lecture, an event which Beckett still recalled many years later. The lecture focused on the subject of the "never properly born." Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot.^[9] In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it (it was eventually published in 1993). Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.

Beckett published a number of essays and reviews, including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in The Bookman, August 1934) and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems (in The Dublin Magazine, July–September 1934). They focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the French symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland", Beckett was tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.^[10]

In 1935—the year that Beckett successfully published a book of his poetry, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates—Beckett worked on his novel Murphy. In May, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. In mid-1936 he wrote to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin to offer himself as their apprentices. Nothing came of this, however, as Beckett's letter was lost owing to Eisenstein's quarantine during the smallpox outbreak, as well as his focus on a script re-write of his postponed film production. Beckett, meanwhile, finished Murphy and then, in 1936, departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen and noted his distaste for the Nazi savagery that was overtaking the country. Returning to Ireland briefly in 1937, he oversaw the publication of Murphy (1938), which he translated into French the following year. He fell out with his mother, which contributed to his decision to settle permanently in Paris. Beckett remained in Paris following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, preferring, in his own words, "France at war to Ireland at peace".^[11] His was soon a known face in and around Left Bank cafés, where he strengthened his allegiance with Joyce and forged new ones with artists Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he regularly played chess. Sometime around December 1937, Beckett had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim, who nicknamed him "Oblomov" (after the character in Ivan Goncharov's novel).^[12]

In January 1938 in Paris, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp (who went by the name of Prudent). Joyce arranged a private room for Beckett at the hospital. The publicity surrounding the stabbing attracted the attention of Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who previously knew Beckett slightly from his first stay in Paris. This time, however, the two would begin a lifelong companionship. At a preliminary hearing, Beckett asked his attacker for the motive behind the stabbing. Prudent replied: "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse" ["I do not know, sir. I'm sorry"].^[13] Beckett eventually dropped the charges against his attacker—partially to avoid further formalities, partly because he found Prudent likeable and well-mannered. Beckett occasionally recounted the incident in jest.^{[citation needed]}

World War II[link]

Beckett joined the French Resistance after the 1940 occupation by Germany, in which he worked as a courier. On several occasions over the next two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and Suzanne fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in the Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region. There he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work in later life.^[14]

Beckett was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would refer to his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff".^[15][16] While in hiding in Roussillon, he continued work on the novel Watt (begun in 1941 and completed in 1945, but not published until 1953, though an extract had appeared in the Dublin literary periodical Envoy).

Fame: novels and the theatre[link]

In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. Beckett had felt that he would remain forever in the shadow of Joyce, certain to never best him at his own game. His revelation prompted him to change direction and to acknowledge both his own stupidity and his interest in ignorance and impotence:

"I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."^[17]

Portrait of Samuel Beckett by Reginald Gray, painted in Paris, 1961 (from the collection of Ken White, Dublin).

Knowlson argues that "Beckett was rejecting the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it ... In future, his work would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss – as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er.'"^[18] The revelation "has rightly been regarded as a pivotal moment in his entire career." Beckett fictionalised the experience in his play Krapp's Last Tape (1958). While listening to a tape he made earlier in his life, Krapp hears his younger self say "clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most...", at which point Krapp fast-forwards the tape (before the audience can hear the complete revelation). Beckett later explained to Knowlson that the missing words on the tape are "precious ally".^[18]

In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes published the first part of Beckett’s short story "Suite" (later to be called "La fin", or "The End"), not realizing that Beckett had only submitted the first half of the story; Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. Beckett also began to write his fourth novel, Mercier et Camier, which was not published until 1970. The novel presaged his most famous work, the play Waiting for Godot, which was written not long afterwards. More importantly, the novel was Beckett’s first long work that he wrote in French, the language of most of his subsequent works, including the poioumenon "trilogy" of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Despite being a native English speaker, Beckett wrote in French because—as he himself claimed—it was easier for him thus to write "without style".^[19]

Beckett is most famous for his play Waiting for Godot (1953). In a much-quoted article, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett "has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice."^[20] Like most of his works after 1947, the play was first written in French with the title En attendant Godot. Beckett worked on the play between October 1948 and January 1949.^[21] He published it in 1952 and it premièred in 1953; an English translation appeared two years later. The play was a critical, popular, and controversial success in Paris. It opened in London in 1955 to mainly negative reviews, but the tide turned with positive reactions from Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times and, later, Kenneth Tynan. In the United States, it flopped in Miami and had a qualified success in New York City. After this, the play became extremely popular, with highly successful performances in the US and Germany. It is frequently performed today.

Beckett translated all of his works into English himself, with the exception of Molloy, for which he collaborated with Patrick Bowles. The success of Waiting for Godot opened up a career in theatre for its author. Beckett went on to write a number of successful full-length plays, including Endgame (1957), the Krapp's Last Tape (1958, written in English), Happy Days (1961, also written in English), and Play (1963). In 1961, Beckett received the International Publishers' Formentor Prize in recognition of his work, which he shared that year with Jorge Luis Borges.

Later life and death[link]

Tomb of Samuel Beckett at the Cimetière de Montparnasse

The 1960s was a period of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and as a writer. In 1961, he married Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England (its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law). The success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a theatre director. In 1956, he had his first commission from the BBC Third Programme for a radio play, All That Fall. He continued writing sporadically for radio and extended his scope to include cinema and television. He began to write in English again, although he also wrote in French until the end of his life.

From the late 1950s until his death, Beckett had a relationship with Barbara Bray, a widow who worked as a script editor for the BBC. Knowlson wrote of them: "She was small and attractive, but, above all, keenly intelligent and well-read. Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted by her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with Suzanne, for the rest of his life".^[22]

In October 1969 while on holiday in Tunis with Suzanne, Beckett heard that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Anticipating that her intensely private husband would be saddled with fame from that moment on, Suzanne called the award a "catastrophe".^[23] In true ascetic fashion, he gave away all of the prize money. While Beckett did not devote much time to interviews, he sometimes met the artists, scholars, and admirers who sought him out in the anonymous lobby of the Hotel PLM St. Jacques in Paris near his Montparnasse home.^[24] Although an intensely private man, a review of the second volume of Beckett's letters by Roy Foster, appearing in the December 15, 2011 issue of The New Republic, reveals Beckett to be not only unexpectedly amiable but frequently prepared to talk about his work and particularly about the process behind it.^[25]

Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Beckett died on 22 December of the same year. The two were interred together in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be "any colour, so long as it's grey."

Works[link]

Caricature of Beckett by Edmund S. Valtman

Beckett's career as a writer can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which period he wrote what are probably his best-known works; and his late period, from the early 1960s until Beckett's death in 1989, during which his works tended to become shorter and his style more minimalist.

Early works[link]

Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly influenced by the work of his friend James Joyce. They are erudite and seem to display the author's learning merely for its own sake, resulting in several obscure passages. The opening phrases of the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934) affords a representative sample of this style:

It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular.^[26]

The passage makes reference to Dante's Commedia, which can serve to confuse readers not familiar with that work. It also anticipates aspects of Beckett's later work: the physical inactivity of the character Belacqua; the character's immersion in his own head and thoughts; the somewhat irreverent comedy of the final sentence.

Similar elements are present in Beckett's first published novel, Murphy (1938), which also explores the themes of insanity and chess (both of which would be recurrent elements in Beckett's later works). The novel's opening sentence hints at the somewhat pessimistic undertones and black humour that animate many of Beckett's works: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new".^[27] Watt, written while Beckett was in hiding in Roussillon during World War II, is similar in terms of themes but less exuberant in its style. It explores human movement as if it were a mathematical permutation, presaging Beckett's later preoccupation—in both his novels and dramatic works—with precise movement.

Beckett's 1930 essay Proust was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's pessimism and laudatory descriptions of saintly asceticism. At this time Beckett began to write creatively in the French language. In the late 1930s, he wrote a number of short poems in that language and their sparseness—in contrast to the density of his English poems of roughly the same period, collected in Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935)—seems to show that Beckett, albeit through the medium of another language, was in process of simplifying his style, a change also evidenced in Watt.

Middle period[link]

After World War II, Beckett turned definitively to the French language as a vehicle. It was this, together with the "revelation" experienced in his mother's room in Dublin—in which he realized that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world—that would result in the works for which Beckett is best remembered today.

During the 15 years following the war, Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd"—deal in a very blackly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and Godot were centerpieces of the book. Esslin claimed these plays were the fulfillment of Albert Camus's concept of "the absurd";^[29] this is one reason Beckett is often falsely labeled as an existentialist (this is based on the assumption that Camus was an existentialist, though he in fact broke off from the existentialist movement and founded his own philosophy). Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole.^[30]

Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible world. The words of Nell—one of the two characters in Endgame who are trapped in ashbins, from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—can best summarize the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."^[31]

Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the three novels Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies) and L'innommable (1953: The Unnamable). In these novels—sometimes referred to as a "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit wishes—the prose becomes increasingly bare and stripped down.^[32] Molloy, for instance, still retains many of the characteristics of a conventional novel (time, place, movement, and plot) and it makes use of the structure of a detective novel. In Malone Dies, however, movement and plot are largely dispensed with, though there is still some indication of place and the passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in The Unnamable, almost all sense of place and time are abolished, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing, and its almost equally strong urge towards silence and oblivion. Despite the widely held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end; witness, for instance, the famous final phrase of The Unnamable: 'I can't go on, I'll go on'.^[33]

After these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief "stories" later collected as Texts for Nothing. In the late 1950s, however, he created one of his most radical prose works, Comment c'est (1961; How It Is). This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese: "You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark"^[34] Following this work, it would be almost another decade before Beckett produced a work of non-dramatic prose. How It Is is generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer. In 1959 he contributed to the British arts review X (magazine) with L'Image.

Late works[link]

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited an increasing tendency—already evident in much of his work of the 1950s—towards compactness. This has led to his work sometimes being described as minimalist. The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece Breath, which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on Oh! Calcutta!, the theatrical revue for which it served as an introductory piece).^[35]

In his theatre of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements. The ironically titled Play (1962), for instance, consists of three characters immersed up to their necks in large funeral urns. The television drama Eh Joe (1963), which was written for the actor Jack MacGowran, is animated by a camera that steadily closes in to a tight focus upon the face of the title character. The play Not I (1972) consists almost solely of, in Beckett's words, "a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness".^[36] Following from Krapp's Last Tape, many of these later plays explore memory, often in the form of a forced recollection of haunting past events in a moment of stillness in the present. They also deal with the theme of the self confined and observed, with a voice that either comes from outside into the protagonist's head (as in Eh Joe) or else another character comments on the protagonist silently, by means of gesture (as in Not I). Beckett's most politically charged play, Catastrophe (1982), which was dedicated to Václav Havel, deals relatively explicitly with the idea of dictatorship. After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of mirlitonnades, with some as short as six words long. These defied Beckett's usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into the other of his two languages; several writers, including Derek Mahon, have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence has been published in English.

Beckett's prose pieces during the late period were not so prolific as his theatre, as suggested by the title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts Fizzles (which the American artist Jasper Johns illustrated). Beckett experienced something of a renaissance, however, with the novella Company (1980), which continued with Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) and Worstward Ho (1984), which was later collected in Nohow On. In these three "'closed space' stories",^[37] Beckett continued his preoccupation with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies in space, as the opening phrases of Company make clear: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." "To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said."^[38]

In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire"). The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life.

Collaborators[link]

Jack MacGowran[link]

Jack MacGowran was the first actor to do a one-man show based on the works of Beckett. He debuted End of Day in Dublin in 1962, revising it as Beginning To End (1965). The show went through further revisions before Beckett directed it in Paris in 1970; MacGowran won the 1970-71 Obie for Best Performance By an Actor when he performed the show off-Broadway as Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote the radio play Embers and the teleplay Eh Joe specifically for MacGowran. The actor also appeared in various productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and did several readings of Beckett's plays and poems on BBC Radio; he also recorded the LP, MacGowran Speaking Beckett.

Billie Whitelaw[link]

Billie Whitelaw worked with Beckett for 25 years on such plays as Not I, Eh Joe, Krapp's Last Tape, and Footfalls. She first met Beckett in 1963. In her autobiography she describes their first meeting in 1963 was "trust at first sight". Beckett went on to write many of his experimental theatre works for her. She came to be regarded as his muse, the "supreme interpreter of his work", perhaps most famous for her role as the mouth in Not I. She said of the play Rockabye: "I put the tape in my head. And I sort of look in a particular way, but not at the audience. Sometimes as a director Beckett comes out with absolute gems and I use them a lot in other areas. We were doing Happy Days and I just did not know where in the theatre to look during this particular section. And I asked, and he thought for a bit and then said, 'Inward' ".^[39][40][41] She said of her role in Footfalls: "I felt like a moving, musical Edvard Munch painting and, in fact, when Beckett was directing Footfalls he was not only using me to play the notes but I almost felt that he did have the paintbrush out and was painting."^[42] "Sam knew that I would turn myself inside out to give him what he wanted", she explained; "With all of Sam's work, the scream was there, my task was to try to get it out." She stopped performing his plays in 1989 when he died.^[43]

Jocelyn Herbert[link]

The seminal English stage designer Jocelyn Herbert was a close friend and influence on Beckett until his death. She worked with him on such plays as Happy Days (their third project) and Krapp's Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre. Beckett said that Herbert became his closest friend in England: "She has a great feeling for the work and is very sensitive and doesn't want to bang the nail on the head. Generally speaking, there is a tendency on the part of designers to overstate, and this has never been the case with Jocelyn."^[44]

Legacy[link]

Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He opened up the possibility of theatre and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of time and place in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. Václav Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins, Tom Stoppard, and Harold Pinter have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett's example. He has had a wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and after.^[45] In an Irish context, he has exerted great influence on poets such as John Banville, Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, as well as writers like Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh who proclaim their adherence to the modernist tradition as an alternative to the dominant realist mainstream.

The Samuel Beckett Bridge, Dublin

Many major 20th-century composers, including Luciano Berio, György Kurtág, Morton Feldman, Pascal Dusapin, Scott Fields, Philip Glass, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Heinz Holliger have created musical works based on his texts. Beckett's work was also an influence on many visual artists, including Bruce Nauman, Douglas Gordon, Alexander Arotin, and Avigdor Arikha; Arikha, as well as some short film makers, like Leila Newton-Fox,has been inspired by his play 'Endgame' created a short film 'Stalemate'. In addition to being inspired by Beckett's literary world, also drew a number of portraits of Beckett and illustrated several of his works.

Beckett is one of the most widely discussed and highly prized of 20th-century authors, inspiring a critical industry to rival that which has sprung up around James Joyce. He has divided critical opinion. Some early philosophical critics, such as Sartre and Theodor Adorno, praised him, one for his revelation of absurdity, the other for his works' critical refusal of simplicities; others such as Georg Lukács condemn for 'decadent' lack of realism.^[46] American critic Harold Bloom pays attention to his atheism of Anglican source, compared with James Joyce's, former Catholic bent, noting:

As for Christianity and Waiting for Godot, Beckett was [...] definitive: «Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar and so I use it. But not in this case.» It is always worth remembering that Beckett more than shared Joyce's distaste for Christianity and for Ireland. Both men chose unbelief and Paris.^[47]

Since Beckett's death, all rights for performance of his plays are handled by the Beckett estate, currently managed by Edward Beckett (the author's nephew). The estate has a controversial reputation for maintaining firm control over how Beckett's plays are performed and does not grant licenses to productions that do not adhere strictly to the writer's stage directions.

Historians interested in tracing Beckett's blood line were, in 2004, granted access to confirmed trace samples of his DNA to conduct molecular genealogical studies to facilitate precise lineage determination.

Some of the best-known pictures of Beckett were taken by photographer John Minihan, who photographed him between 1980 and 1985 and developed such a good relationship with the writer that he became, in effect, his official photographer. Some consider one of these to be among the top three photographs of the 20th century.^[48] It was the theater photographer John Haynes, however, who took possibly the most widely reproduced image of Beckett: it is used on the cover of the Knowlson biography, for instance. This portrait was taken during rehearsals of the San Quentin Drama Workshop at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where Haynes photographed many productions of Beckett's work.^[49]

On 10 December 2009, the newest bridge across the River Liffey in Dublin was opened and named the Samuel Beckett Bridge in his honour. Reminiscent of a harp on its side, it was designed by the celebrated Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who had also designed the James Joyce Bridge further upstream opened on Bloomsday (16 June) 2003. Attendees at the official opening ceremony included Beckett’s niece Caroline Murphy, his nephew Edward Beckett, poet Seamus Heaney and Barry McGovern.^[50]

Honours and awards[link]

• Croix de guerre (France)
• Médaille de la Résistance (France)
• 1959 honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin
• 1961 International Publishers' Formentor Prize (shared with Jorge Luis Borges).
• 1968 Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[51]
• 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Selected works by Beckett[link]

Dramatic works[link]

Prose collections and longer works[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Beckett editions[link]

• As the Story was Told: Uncollected and Later Prose. London: Calder Publications, 1990
• Collected Poems in English and French. New York: Grove Press, 1977.
• Endgame and Act Without Words. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
• How It Is. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
• More Pricks than Kicks. New York: Grove Press, 1972.
• Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957.
• Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
• Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press, 1995.
• Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. New York: Grove Press, 1954.

Other[link]

• Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski, ed. (2004). The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press
• Badiou, Alain (2003). On Beckett, transl. and ed. by Alberto Toscano and Nina Power. London: Clinamen Press.
• Bair, Deirdre (1978). Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Vintage/Ebury ISBN 0-09-980070-5.
• Casanova, Pascale (2007). Beckett. Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. Introduction by Terry Eagleton. Londres / New York : Verso Books
• Caselli, Daniela. Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism. ISBN 0-7190-7156-9.
• Cronin, Anthony (1997). Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. New York: Da Capo Press
• Esslin, Martin (1969). The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books
• Fleming, Justin (2007). Coup d'État & Other Plays Burnt Piano. Xlibris
• Fletcher, John (2006). About Beckett. Faber and Faber, London ISBN 978-0-571-23011-2.
• Gussow, Mel. "Samuel Beckett Is Dead at 83; His 'Godot' Changed Theater." The New York Times, 27 December 1989.
• Harvey, Robert (2010), "Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics". Continuum. ISBN 978-1-4411-2424-1
• Igoe, Vivien (2000). A Literary Guide to Dublin. Methuen Publishing ISBN 0-413-69120-9.
• Kelleter, Frank (1998). Die Moderne und der Tod: Edgar Allan Poe–T. S. Eliot–Samuel Beckett. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang
• Knowlson, James (1997). Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press
• Mercier, Vivian (1977). Beckett/Beckett. Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-281269-6.
• Murray, Christopher, ed. (2009). Samuel Beckett: Playwright & Poet. New York: Pegasus Books ISBN 978-1-60598-002-7
• O'Brien, Eoin. The Beckett Country. ISBN 0-571-14667-8.
• Ricks, Christopher (1995). Beckett's Dying Words. Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-282407-4.
• Ryan, John, ed. (1970). A Bash In The Tunnel. Brighton: Clifton Books, 1970. Essays on James Joyce by Beckett, Flann O’Brien & Patrick Kavanagh
• L’image, by Samuel Beckett, ‘X’ magazine; An Anthology from X (Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-19-212266-5); First appeared in X, 1959.
• Simpson, Alan (1962). Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin. Routledge and Kegan Paul
• Young, Jordan R. (1987). The Beckett Actor: Jack MacGowran, Beginning to End. Beverly Hills: Moonstone Press ISBN 0-940410-82-6

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Samuel Beckett

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Samuel Beckett

• Guardian Article by Peter Hall. 4 January 2003. "Godotmania". Accessed 2010-08-24
• University of Texas online exhibition of Beckett at the Harry Ransom Center. Accessed 2010-08-24
• "The Making of Samuel Beckett" by J.M. Coetzee. The New York Review of Books 30 April 2009. Accessed 2010-08-24
• The Samuel Beckett Papers at Washington University in St. Louis. Accessed 2010-08-24
• "Sam I Am – Beckett’s private purgatories" by Benjamin Kunkel in The New Yorker. 7, August 2006. Accessed 2010-08-24
• Keith Ridgway considers Beckett's Mercier and Camier. "Knowing me, knowing you". The Guardian 19 July 2003 Accessed 2010-08-24
• The Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. Accessed 2010-08-24
• The Samuel Beckett Society Accessed 2010-08-24
• The Journal of Beckett Studies. Edinburgh University Press. Accessed 2010-08-24
• Nick Mount on Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. Video lecture. University of Toronto. Accessed 2010-08-24
• Archival material relating to Samuel Beckett listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Portraits of Samuel Beckett at the National Portrait Gallery, London

v t e The plays of Samuel Beckett Stage: Act Without Words I Act Without Words II Breath Catastrophe Come and Go Eleutheria (posthumous) Endgame Footfalls Happy Days Krapp's Last Tape Not I Ohio Impromptu A Piece of Monologue Play Rockaby Rough for Theatre I Rough for Theatre II That Time Waiting for Godot What Where Radio: All That Fall Cascando Embers The Old Tune Rough for Radio I Rough for Radio II Words and Music Television: ...but the clouds... Eh Joe Ghost Trio Nacht und Träume Quad Screen: Film