Abstract
On 5 January 1953 Waiting for Godot challenged its first theatre audience with a dramatic work that seemed radically different from any they had witnessed before. The spectators at the tiny Théâtre Babylone saw a play in which two actors, representing indigent tramps named Vladimir and Estragon, perform a series of routines on a stage marked only by a mound and a single tree. Two other men, a master and his servant, pass through, stopping with them for a time. The tramps claim to be stationed at this site to meet a man they call Godot. Late in the first act a young boy arrives to deliver a message that this man has postponed their appointment until the next day. With some variation the second act repeats the events of the first. Godot never comes.
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References
Jean Anouilh, Arts Spectacles (27 February–5 March 1953) p. 1.
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday, 1961) p. 6.
Colin Duckworth, ‘The Making of Godot’, in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Casebook on Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1967) p. 89.
Duckworth and Fletcher cited in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 381.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965) p. 134.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954) pp. 39b–40a. Further quotations from this play will not be noted individually.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 302.
Molloy, p. 7.
The Unnamable, p. 294.
Molloy, p.7.
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, in Three Novels, p. 180.
Charles R. Lyons, ‘Beckett’s Major Plays and the Trilogy’, Comparative Drama, 5 (Winter, 1971–2) p. 261.
Anselm Atkins, ‘A Note on the Structure of Lucky’s Speech’, Modern Drama, 9 (December 1966) p. 309.
See, for example, Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Stanford University Press, 1959) p. 39.
August Strindberg, ‘The Author’s Preface to Miss Julie’, trans. Evert Sprinchorn, in Robert Corrigan (ed.), Masterpieces of the Modern Scandinavian Theatre (New York: Collier Books, 1967) pp. 140–1.
Cohn, The Comic Gamut, p. 211.
Ibid., p. 216.
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1950) pp. 27–86.
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© 1983 Charles R. Lyons
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Lyons, C.R. (1983). ‘Waiting for Godot’. In: Samuel Beckett. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17047-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17047-0_2
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