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8 - Dead heads

damnation-narration in the ‘dramaticules’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

John Pilling
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Summary

E un ch’avea perduti ambo li orecchi per la freddura, pur col viso in giùe disse ‘Perché cotanto in noi ti specchi? ’

Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIII

BECKETT’S ‘DRAMATICULES’: THE DYING AND THE GOING

When, in 1978, the actor David Warrilow asked Samuel Beckett to write him a play about death, he would appear to have been guilty of a fortunate tautology. Fortunate, because the playwright's generous response to the request was the beautiful miniature A piece of monologue (1979), whose opening is surely his most chillingly paradoxical statement of the chosen theme: 'Birth was the death of him' (CSPL, 265). But a tautology nonetheless, at least according to the play's protagonist, Speaker, who - as if in reply to the actor - denies that any other topic is even thinkable, or speakable: 'Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going.' Or to put it another way, to ask Beckett for a play on death was like asking, say, Petrarch for a sonnet on love: as if he might have written one that was not. All of Beckett's drama, especially his later drama, insofar as it is 'about' anything, is essentially 'about death'.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

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  • Dead heads
  • Edited by John Pilling, University of Reading
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521413664.008
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  • Dead heads
  • Edited by John Pilling, University of Reading
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521413664.008
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Dead heads
  • Edited by John Pilling, University of Reading
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521413664.008
Available formats
×