Godot’s Shakespeare

ABSTRACT

While the connection between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and King Lear has become something of a critical commonplace, references to other Shakespeare plays can also be found throughout. This essay traces Godot’s debt to two plays in particular. First it argues how Godot not only draws on Hamlet’s graveyard scene for macabre imagery, but how it also construes an extended meta-theatrical parody of Hamlet’s soliloquies about the contrast between acting and talking/thinking. The second half of the essay proposes a number of connections with The Tempest, and specifically with its “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban. It argues how the figure of Caliban not merely functions as a model for a colonial power-dynamic that can be seen to operate here and elsewhere in Beckett, but how Caliban is equally significant as a lyrical figure whose great speech about sleeping, waking, and dreaming informs Beckett’s play in a number of ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Samuel Beckett
• William Shakespeare
• Waiting for Godot
• intertextuality
• postcolonial
• soliloquy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 43–4. All further references will be cited parenthetically.

2. Van Hulle and Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library, 25.

3. Shakespearean puns, references and allusions in early works like Proust, More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy and Watt are listed in the chapter on “Shakespearean Embers in Beckett” in Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, 375–6. On some of the uses to which Shakespeare is put in those late prose works, see Van Hulle, “Beckett and Shakespeare,” passim.

4. Beckett to McGreevy, 16 January 1936, in Letters 1, 299.

5. Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, V.ii.29, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare. All further references to Shakespeare’s plays will be cited parenthetically from this edition.

6. See in particular Bair, Samuel Beckett; Knowlson, Damned to Fame; as well as Knowlson and Knowlson, Beckett Remembering.

7. Shakespeare, Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 2:539 (emphasis added).

8. See Carroll, Great Feast of Language, 6–7, 11–64.

9. Beckett, Malone Dies, 16.

10. Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 124.

11. See Wheatley, “Nothing”; Foakes, “King Lear and Endgame.”

12. In addition to that line from King Lear, there may be another Shakespearean echo at work here. McMillan and Knowlson propose that Estragon’s statement is a reworking of Malvolio’s “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em” (Twelfth Night, II.v.140–1). McMillan and Knowlson, eds, Theatrical Notebooks 1, 163–4. If this echo is indeed there, then this would not be the only reference to that play or that character in Godot. Vladimir’s sudden, artificial smile, a substitute for the laughter that hurts his pubis (“One daren’t even laugh any more. […] Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It’s not the same thing.” [11]), may recall the unnatural forced smile of Malvolio which makes him look as if he is “tainted in’s wits” (III.iv.13).

13. Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, 376. See also Foakes, “King Lear and Endgame,” 153; Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 124.

14. Ibid., 120.

15. Ibid., 120.

16. Brustein, Theatre of Revolt, 30.

17. See for example Ronan McDonald’s comment that Godot is “haunted by the ghosts of Auschwitz”. McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Literature, 142.

18. Or perhaps, in their psychic awareness of the “charnel house[s]” of contemporary Europe, Vladimir and Estragon are also remembering T.S. Eliot’s imagery of a post-First World War wasteland: a “rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones” – an image linked by Eliot with a line from Ariel’s song in The Tempest (I.ii.402) about an underwater boneyard where drowned sailors lie with “pearls that were his eyes”. See Eliot, The Waste Land, 27.

19. Esslin, Absurd Drama, 14.

20. Arnold, Poems, vi.

21. For an overview of some representative critical responses, see Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, 136–40.

22. The doubling of the word “question” which draws attention to itself in the English text does not exist in the original French; nor does the echo of Hamlet’s famous “that is the question.” In French, Vladimir says more plainly, and without lexical repetition: “Mais la question n’est pas là. Que faisons-nous ici, voilà ce qu’il faut se demander” (Beckett, En attendant Godot, 135). It appears, then, that when Beckett came to translate the play into English (“Horrible language, which I still know too well” [Beckett to Georges Duthuit, ?28 June 1949, in Letters 2, 170]), the echo of Hamlet was too suggestive to resist – especially since the subject of Vladimir’s soliloquy, and his reason for soliloquising in the first place, are so indebted to the figure of Hamlet.

23. That desire is an omnipresent theme in Beckett’s work from the 1950s. The unnameable narrator-protagonist of the novel Beckett started immediately after he finished typing En attendant Godot in March 1949 (see the Chronology for 1949 in Beckett, Letters 2, 109) also finally has to acknowledge the strategies he had invented “to put off the hour when I must speak of me.” Beckett, The Unnamable, 19.

24. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 542.

25. McMillan and Knowlson, eds, Theatrical Notebooks 1, 73.

26. In the eighteenth century, for example, Garrick performed the “To be or not to be” soliloquy “with arms folded in the traditional ‘melancholy’ posture” (Dawson, Hamlet, 40). A late-nineteenth-century critic described old-fashioned Victorian Hamlets “stalking down the footlights with his arms folded, solemnly wagging his plume-laden head […], and after more than a decent pause, delivering the well-known soliloquy in a sepulchral voice.” Qtd in Rosenberg, Masks of Hamlet, 469.

27. Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 58–9.

28. Shenker, “Interview,” 147.

29. In addition, even those who did have the decisiveness to join the Resistance were often forced to spend their days waiting around (perhaps with folded arms). Beckett found the inactivity of life in the Resistance in Roussillon very frustrating, and his memory of the curious intermingling of danger and boredom in those days may be another factor informing Vladimir’s speech.

30. As Ruby Cohn pointed out, the epithet is more “literary” in the French original – “à l’instar de la divine Miranda” (Beckett, En attendant Godot, 72) – than it is in Beckett’s English translation. Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, 376.

31. Ferdinand is described as sexually “limp” in Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, 367. Caliban is described as a “salvage and deformed slave” in the list of characters in the First Folio of 1623.

32. Hobson, Review of Godot, 94.

33. Beckett, Dream, 128.

34. Beckett to Reavey, 14 May 1947, in Letters 2, 55.

35. Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, 376.

36. Beckett, Watt, 179.

37. Ibid., 173; Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban, 17.

38. On this cultural context of the Nackybal episode in Watt, see Harrington, The Irish Beckett, 131–4. Note though, that, as Harrington acknowledges, the novel’s treatment of this trope is complicated by the revelation of Mr Nackybal’s true identity later on in the narrative: “his real name was Tisler and he lived in a room on the canal” (Beckett, Watt, 198). This final twist further sharpens Beckett’s satiric condemnation of the absurd cultural politics of the Free State.

39. Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, 63. This same distinction between the respective qualities associated with Prospero’s two slaves is also replicated in the way Beckett remarked on the contrast between Godot’s two central characters during rehearsals for the Schiller Theatre production in Berlin in 1975: “Estragon is on the ground, he belongs to the stone. Vladimir is light, he is oriented towards the sky.” Asmus, “Beckett Directs Godot,” 21.

40. Beckett, Endgame, 32, 39. Ruby Cohn has carried out a sustained reading of overlaps between Endgame and The Tempest, and specifically of Hamm as Prospero. See Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, 381–3.

41. See Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 276–7, 557–8.

42. Mercier, Beckett / Beckett, 53.

43. Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, 290.

44. See Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban, 252–70 (the quote is from p. 270).

45. Ibid., 12. On The Tempest’s conflicting internal evidence for Caliban’s humanity and deformity, see ibid., 9–15.

46. Time is an important idea throughout Waiting for Godot. In their confusion over what they have done and where they have been before, the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are significant markers for the main characters (in Act 1, the words “tomorrow” and “yesterday” are used six times each; in Act 2, they appear eight and twenty-four times respectively). It must be significant that both acts conclude with the arrival of a boy, apparently an envoy from the eponymous Godot, and that Vladimir’s conversation with the Boy at the conclusion of both acts is marked by the play’s highest concentration of the word “tomorrow” (91–2). The reiteration of that word may be a final Shakespearean marker in Beckett’s temporal tragicomedy. Because Vladimir’s repeated “tomorrow” must recall, to the Shakespearean ear that has been alerted by the many other allusions throughout, the soliloquy from the denouement of Macbeth that had so “thrilled” Beckett when he read it as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, in the 1920s (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 54) – the one that begins with that most forward-looking of pentameters: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”. If this is the case, does this then make Vladimir and Estragon the “poor player” (or players, in duplicate) conjured by Macbeth as a simile for the condition of the futility of life itself, who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more”? And does that in turn then make the ranting, gibbering Lucky, who joins them on stage to tell his “tale […] full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,” the “idiot” from the same speech? (see Macbeth, V.v.16–27).

47. Richard Schechner offers a cogent explanation for this reaction: “Gogo/Didi (and later the Boy) have definite appointments, a rendezvous they must keep. Pozzo/Lucky are free agents, aimless, not tied to anything but each other. For this reason, Pozzo’s watch is very important to him. Having nowhere to go, his only relation to the world is in knowing ‘the time’.” Schechner, “Lots of Time,” 269.

48. Beckett, Proust, 11 (emphasis added).

49. Ibid., 14–15.

50. See for example Childs, Modernism, 49–50.

51. It may be significant, in light of this, that Clov’s “violent” Calibanesque outburst in Endgame is also provoked by an allusion to the passing of time: “CLOV: I oiled them yesterday. / HAMM: Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday! / CLOV: (violently). That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me.” Beckett, Endgame, 32.

52. Neill, “Noises,” 49.

53. Ibid., 54.

54. See Beckett’s stage direction: Waiting for Godot, 15.

55. See particularly Plato, Theaetetus 158b-d (Complete Works, 176).

56. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, 375.

57. Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, 298.