Images of Beckett - Index of

over ten years before he wrote a play himself. During his stay in Germany
in 1936–7, in Berlin, he went to see the actor Werner Krauss, starring in
Hebbel’s poetic tragedy of jealousy and sexual tension, Gyges und sein Ring
(Gyges and his Ring) (1856). Afterwards, in his private diary, he set down his
objections to ‘poetical drama’: ‘the poetical play’, he wrote, ‘can never come
off as play, nor when played as poetry either, because the words obscure the
action and are obscured by it’. 27 He went on to argue in a letter to an Irish
friend, Mary Manning, that the Hebbel ‘play is such good poetry that it never
comes alive at all’, poetic speeches being ‘too self-sufficient to be merely
phases of a dramatic expression’. 28 Interestingly, in his diary he went on to
compare the poetic drama of Hebbel and the theatre of Racine (on whom he
had given a course of lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, and of whom he was
a great admirer). Racine, he claimed, ‘never elaborates the expression in this
sense, never stands by the word in this sense, and therefore his plays are not
“poetical” i.e. undramatic in this sense’. 29
In the late 1940s and early 1950s poetic drama in English meant verse
drama like Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946) and The Lady’s Not for
Burning (1948) or T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949) and the earlier Murder in
the Cathedral (1935). In French (although most of their plays were not written
in actual verse form), it meant the drama of Jean Vauthier, Jacques Audiberti,
Paul Claudel, even Jean Giraudoux. Whether in verse or in prose, the
dominant form of expression in these plays was a lyrical, poeticised, often
purely decorative form of language. There are, of course, many memorable
passages in Beckett’s own plays that could be described as ‘poetic’ in a
conventional sense: Pozzo’s tirade on time, for example, ‘They give birth
astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’, 30 or
Vladimir and Estragon’s beautifully patterned, lyrical exchanges, ‘All the dead
voices. / They make a noise like wings. / Like leaves. / Like sand. / Like
leaves.’ 31 But Beckett felt that the theatre should be poetic in a deeper sense
than this, and the poetry in his plays is usually integral to the dramatic
situation. In Waiting for Godot, for instance, the dramatic action is reduced to
near stasis and a poetic metaphor is made of the central waiting situation. In
Endgame the characters slowly enact the difficulty of ‘ending’ in a drama that
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