Beckett's Shakespeare, or, Silencing the Bard

The essay argues that Samuel Beckett’s dislike of and impatience with Shakespeare show very early in his works: while it is true that quotations and references are many, they seem to deflate and undermine the dramatic and poetic qualities of the Stratford playwright and to emphasize on the contrary the ritualized and trite nature of its presence. Shakespeare, however, is not easy to discard and resists the attempts on his life and his memory in various ways: as he is confronted to another classical dramatist often to be met in Beckett’s works, Jean Racine, or else when he surfaces in the stagecraft of Gordon Craig which definitely had a huge though unformulated impact on Beckett’s poetics.