Images of Beckett - Index of

Vladimir did the Tree, although he was adopting a position in yoga, he
was also restating in oblique, passing form that same crucifixion theme.
The evidence of Beckett’s fascination with crucifixion imagery is also
displayed in his draft play manuscript fragments, as well as in his
correspondence and in doodles discovered in his private notebooks. In 1937
he wrote to Tom MacGreevy about a number of paintings in the illustrated
catalogue of Munich’s Alte Pinakotek: ‘I was very interested also in the
stiff-legged Cranach Crucifixions and the Burg[k]mair ditto, with the thieves
in less than profile. An idea for a Christ crucified with his back to the
spectator.’ 43 In fact, he tried to write just such a play in the early 1950s, in
which the central image was that of a man elevated on a cross, although
not with his back to the spectator. 44
In Endgame, a blood-stained handkerchief covers Hamm’s head at the
beginning and end of the play, calling to mind the legend of Saint Veronica,
whose napkin was said to have retained the imprint of Christ’s face. Beckett
had already alluded to this image in an early poem, ‘Enueg II’: ‘veronica
mundi / veronica munda / give us a wipe for the love of Jesus’. 45 Golgotha,
the ‘place of the skull’ (Matthew 27:33) and the crucifixion itself are evoked
obliquely many times in Beckett’s writing: in Lucky’s ‘think’ (‘the skull,
the skull’) and in the images of the charnel house and of bone and stone in
Waiting for Godot. The skull-like set of Endgame picks up visually a theme that
is stated as Hamm directly associates himself with Christ, partly by his
question ‘Can there be misery...loftier than mine?’, which surely echoes
George Herbert’s poem ‘The Sacrifice’, in which Christ calls out as a refrain:
‘Was ever grief like mine?’ 46 The names, too, in Endgame (Hamm, Clov, Nagg,
Nell) are all variants of hammer and nails. For Beckett, nails invariably
recalled the Crucifixion. 47
Several of the late plays evoke religious imagery subtly, in ways that
considerably deepen the resonance of the text. In Catastrophe, a play written
for Václav Havel when he was under house arrest, the director’s attempt to
reify the protagonist can be viewed as an attempt to reduce a living human
(Left) Alan Stanford and Barry McGovern in Endgame, 1999
IMAGES OF BECKETT 65