Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989:

A Descriptive Chronology of His Plays,
Theatrical Career, and Dramatic Theories

Excerpted with additions and other modifications from Charles A. Carpenter's Modern British, Irish, and American Drama: A Descriptive Chronology, 1865-1965. For an explanation of principles and limitations, click on Introduction above.

A selective bibliography of books by and about the dramatist is appended.

NOW AVAILABLE: The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett: A Selective, Classified International Bibliography of Publications About His Plays and Their Conceptual Foundations

A downloadable file of about 350 pages, continuously updated, compiled by Charles A. Carpenter. Periodic updates sent free of additional charge.

Write him at <ccarpen@binghamton.edu> specifying your preference for WordPerfect or Microsoft Word, and he will email the file on receipt of $30 at the following address: 908 Lehigh Ave., Vestal NY 13850. Be sure to include your email address.

 

1906
April

Samuel Barclay Beckett is born on April 13 (Good Friday) in Foxrock, near Dublin.

1928
October

Beckett accepts a position in Paris, France, and from then on lives only intermittently in Ireland and England.

1931
February
Beckett’s first stage piece, the “irreverent burlesque” of parts of Corneille’s Le Cid entitled Le Kid, is presented at the Peacock Theatre by the Dublin University Modern Language Society. Written in French with a fellow lecturer at Trinity College, Georges Pelorson, the short play violates every stricture of French classical drama. Beckett himself took the role of Don Diègue. No copy of the work has been located.

1934
August

Beckett, a great admirer of W. B. Yeats's poetry, comments in a letter to a friend that he saw the latest of his plays, Resurrection and King of the Great Clock Tower, and found them dull; "Balbus building his wall would be more dramatic."

Reviewing two of O'Casey's short plays in Bookman, Beckett calls him "a master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sensethat he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion. This is the energy of his theatre, the triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements and on all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres. If Juno and the Paycock, as seems likely, is his best work so far, it is because it communicates most fully this dramatic dehiscence, mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation."

1936
December

Beckett reports in a letter to a friend that he may write a play about Samuel Johnson and Mrs Thrale. He had "often thought what a good subject was there, perhaps only one long act. What interested me especially was the breakdown of Johnson as soon as Thrale disappeared." A letter of June 1937 reports that he is making progress on the play, to be entitled Human Wishes, but he never completes more than part of a scene of the projected four acts. That is described and printed as an appendix in Just Play: Beckett's Theater (1980) by Ruby Cohn, to whom Beckett gave the manuscript.

1937
January

Beckett records in a notebook thoughts that underlie his developing antinaturalistic view of life and prefigure his later aesthetic, as he expressed them to Axel Kaun and a man called Meier: "I am not interested in a 'unification' of the historical chaos any more than I am in the 'clarification' of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know. . . . Meier says the background is more important than the foreground, the causes than the effects, the causes than their representatives and opponents. I say the background and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery and venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them. Rationalism is the last form of animism. Whereas the pure incoherence of times and men and places is at least amusing."

1938
January

Beckett is nearly killed when a Parisian pimp, exasperated at his refusal to accompany him, stabs him in the chest, barely missing his heart but inflicting a dangerous injury by penetrating the pleura. Later the two men meet; Beckett asks him why he did it, and the pimp responds, "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse."

1947
January

Writing in French, Beckett composes his first full-length play, Eleuthéria ("Freedom"), finishing it in February. He will never sanction its production or publication, but after many legal wrangles an English translation is published in the United States in 1995 partly because a private production had aroused great interest. The most prominent elements of this "drame bourgeois" are a parodic use of well-made-play devices and a notably incongruous young romantic hero (Victor Krap) whose goal in life is to be "as little as possible," ultimately "nothing."

1949
In "Three Dialogues" with Georges Duthuit (transition49, No.5), Beckett speaks favorably of the artistic revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat "turning from [the plane of the feasible] in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road." They preferred "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."

January
Beckett finishes writing En attendant Godot, having started it in October 1948. It will not reach the stage until January 1953 (in Paris) and, as Waiting for Godot, August 1955 in London and April 1956 in New York.

1953
January

After being published (in French) in October 1952, Beckett's En attendant Godot is staged at the tiny Théâtre de Babylone in Paris and gradually becomes a cause célèbre as Jean Anouilh, Armand Salacrou, Jacques Audiberti, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others champion it. Along with subsequent productions in Germany, the play brings Beckett unaccustomed riches and worldwide attention; as he later puts it, from then on he was "damned to fame." He produces an English version by the end of the year, which is published in 1954 (at the urging of Thornton Wilder) but not staged until August 1955.

1955
August

Beckett's Waiting for Godot, masterfully directed by Peter Hall, is performed on August 3 at the private Arts Theatre Club in London. (A West End production had been planned, but the Lord Chamberlain's office refused a license unless irreverent passages, including the first 15 lines of Lucky's tirade, were excised.) The play's reception is hostile; half the first-night audience leaves at the intermission. But prominent reviews by Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson four days after the opening prompt discerning playgoers to feel they must see it. (Tynan notes, "It forced me to re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough"; Hobson declares prophetically that the play at its best is "something that will securely lodge in a corner of your mind for as long as you live.") In September the production is transferred to the Criterion Theatre in the West End, where its run is extended to a total of 263.

Beckett labeled Waiting for Godot a "tragicomedy," implying a careful blend of the two disparate forms. He told the French director Roger Blin, "The spirit of the play, to the extent to which it has one, is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic." Its radical dramaturgy derives from his success in devising what he will speak of as "a form that accommodates the mess," in his eyes "the task of the artist now." Vivian Mercier will pen the enduring description of its basic form in a review: it is "a play in which nothing happens, twice." The two acts follow the same pattern, with variations, as two interdependent down-and-outs keep a tenuous appointment with a Mr Godot, who does not come. First they kill time with talk and games designed for that purpose; then a diversion, first mistaken for Godot, arrives in the person of a domineering master and his vassal; after they leave, the men kill time again until a boy reports that Mr Godot cannot come today but surely will tomorrow; then night abruptly falls as they consider hanging themselves rather than returning the next day. At the curtains to each act, they decide to depart but remain motionless. The second act, after an ominous cyclical song on the theme of death, is markedly more dismal than the first. Pathos dominates instead of farce as before. Disintegration is inherent in their treadmill existence, and they realize more and more, along with the audience, that succeeding days / acts would bring increased discomfort and the same lack of wish-fulfillment. Their consolations"We always find something . . . to give us the impression we exist" and "We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment"are negated by the overwhelming impression that "nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" The nihilistic theme is stated immediately"Nothing to be done"and the play's cyclical form embodies and transmits this meaning. The alleged entity "Godot" will be interpreted as everything from a fulfilling God to a welcome death; Beckett himself snuffs questions about what he represents by saying "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." (Critics have widely agreed that he represents whatever kind of respite or salvation an individual might seek.) The impact of the play’s minimalist dramaturgy—analogous to the minimalist sculpture of Giacometti (who designed the tree for the Paris premiere)—will be adeptly described by Tom Stoppard in an April 1893 conversation at the National Theatre: Godot “was a shocking event because it completely redefined the minima of a valid theatrical transaction. Up till then, to have a play at all you had to have ‘x,’ you couldn’t have a tenth of ‘x’ and have a play.” Beckett adamantly refuses to permit cuts or other alterations in performances that he cannot supervise, but often makes minor changes on the spot during rehearsals he attends. All editions vary, even the English and American printings; finally two scholars in collaboration with the author produce a "definitive" text in the first volume of the series The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett (1993). This work also reprints many of Beckett's illuminating comments on the meaning, choreography, and musical texture of the play, including detailed notations on Lucky's long speech, recorded from rehearsals for a German production.

December
Beckett comments in a letter to his director Alan Schneider before the impending American premiere of Waiting for Godot: “When it comes to journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. And to insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. If that’s not enough for them, and it obviously isn’t, it’s plenty for us, and we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin” (printed in the Village Voice Reader).

1956
April

Beckett's Waiting for Godot is finally presented on Broadway. Its January preview production in Miami, advertised as the "laugh hit of two continents" and starring the comedians Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, misled audiences and nearly scuttled its New York opening. However, with a new director and advanced billing as a must-see for "seventy thousand intellectuals" (and Lahr still starring), the play attains a run of over 100. Notable among the reviews are Eric Bentley's, focusing on the play's existentialist nausea and "undramatic" theatricalism, and Harold Clurman's reluctant enjoyment of a "poetic harlequinade" masterfully shaped to convey a view of life that repels him.

May
In an interview (New York Times), Beckett compares his aesthetic with that of Joyce: "The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance. There seems to be a kind of esthetic axiom that expression is achievementmust be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusableas something by definition incompatible with art."

June
Beckett comments briefly on Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey in a letter to Cyril Cusack, who had asked him for a tribute to G.B.S. for a centenary programme: "I wouldn't suggest that G.B.S. is not a great play-wright, whatever that is when it's at home. What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk's Well, or the Saints', or a whiff of Juno, to go no further. Sorry."

1957
April

Beckett's Fin de partie, eventually translated as Endgame, is presented in London at the Royal Court Theatre six times before its first Paris production later that month. His first version, written in the first two months of 1955, was in two acts, the first one ending at the apparent death of the master-figure's mother. The one-act revision, for which Beckett supplied an English translation (truncating the scene in which a boy is dimly perceived outside) will usually be supplemented in performance by the brief mime Acte sans paroles, published in English as Act Without Words I, or by the one-act Krapp's Last Tape.

October
Beckett's Endgame is presented six times at the Court in a double premiere with the shorter one-act Krapp's Last Tape. It is revived in October 1958 for a run of 38. Set in an underground shelter whose environs seem to be "corpsed," Endgame moves a degree beyond Waiting for Godot in negativity, superseding that play's theme, "Nothing to be done," with "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished." Beckett will describe the play to the American director Alan Schneider as "rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot." It was immediately dubbed "the ashcan play" because of the startling spectacle of two dying relics, the main character's parents, spending their last hours in such receptacles. It moves these and two other disintegrating personae through an "old endgame lost of old" (the chess metaphor is intentional). However, nothing decisively comes to an endexcept sugarplums, painkillers, coffins and the like. Instead of two highly repetitive acts, the play conveys the "last million last moments" in another abusive but interdependent relationship between master and slave, this pair more like a contemptuous father and sulking boy. Rather than a futile shared commitment to waiting for a "savior," the play depicts the servant-figure building up his determination to abandon his master, and, at the finale, actually posing at the door, dressed for the road. He is not seeking merely to escape but to pursue his dream of extinction, entering a world in which "all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust." But the final tableau reflects the opening one closely, and the servant remains frozen where he stands. ("The end is in the beginning.") The blind, chair-bound master is often preoccupied with composing a story which seems to be based on his one redeeming action long ago, taking the baby of a man who was perishing into his shelter. When his exploited man-slave states that he is leaving and a small boy appears (or seems to) outside, he claims he doesn't need him any more. But at the finale he whistles for him and receives no response. His stoic acceptance of his abandonment is poignant. As in the case of Waiting for Godot (and subsequent major plays), the definitive text of the play appears in the series The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett.

Krapp's Last Tape, another "endgame play" written rapidly in English in early 1958, is an innovative and moving monodrama of lost love and dead aspirations. The 69-year-old title character, a stumbling, white-faced, purple-nosed figure immersed in a void, putters through a minimal existence and nostalgically revisits his past. He does so by playing excerpts from audio tapes made when he was 39, still believed in love, and experienced a "vision" that fired him to produce a "magnum opus." But the book sold only seventeen copiespresumably because the miraculous revelation which inspired him (parallel to one in Beckett's life) was that the profound spiritual gloom that had plagued him was the "reality" that should underlie his work. The old man concludes that the long-lost delights add up to nothing but "all that old misery."

1958
January

Beckett's Endgame is presented Off-Broadway and has a run of 104.

1961
February

Responding to questions put by sixth-form students in Bielefeld, Germany, Beckett comments: "For me, the theatre is not a moral institution in Schiller's sense. I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space. I think in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed" (Spectaculum).

Summer
In a memorable interview with Tom Driver (Columbia University Forum), Beckett expresses his underlying aesthetic principles. Averring that the world is in a state of "buzzing confusion" best conveyed by the term "mess," he states: "The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of." He then speaks of "the tension in art between the mess and form." As paraphrased by Driver: "until recently, art has withstood the pressure of chaotic things. It has held them at bay. It realized that to admit them was to jeopardize form. 'How could the mess be admitted, because it appears to be the opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be?' But now we can keep it out no longer, because we have come into a time when 'it invades our experience at every moment. It is there and it must be allowed in.'" But this does not mean the end of art, with chaos reflecting chaos. There will still be form in art, but "new form" of a type that "admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. . . . That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

September
Beckett's Happy Days is presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York a full year before the first London production (November 1962, Court). Begun in October 1960 and later translated as Oh les beaux jours, the play itself poses the spectator's inevitable question: "What's it meant to mean?" Beckett's latest endgame drama features the striking mythic image of a woman buried in a mound of scorched earth up to her stomach, then after the intermission up to her neck. She resides amid a desert "wilderness" under relentless sunlight with only a scraggly parasol for self-defense. Her useless mate stays behind the mound in a cave, emerging rarely to read from an old newspaper or for the briefest of replies. She busies herself carrying out cosmetic routines and fondling cherished objects (among them a pistol), prattling to her husband as if he were listening, and reflecting on things that pop into her mind, including romantic memories and lines of poetry. Even after her crucial world of things is forbidden to her in Act II, she makes up stories about a little girl and her doll, and clings desperately to the attitude of a Christian polyanna: "it will have been a happy day, after all, another happy day." As in Endgame, the play concludes with a deliberately ambiguous event. Her mate claws his way up the mound, perhaps wanting to help or kiss her, perhaps heading for the pistol, then slithers back down. At the curtain "They look at each other. Long pause."

1962
May
John Russell Taylor’s Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama is published. The book parallels Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd in its effect on drama reviewers, teachers, and playgoers by fixing in the public mind the idea that the English theatre “has undergone a transformation in the last six years or so, and the event which marks ‘then’ off decisively from ‘now’ is the first performance of Look Back in Anger on 8 May 1956.” Critics have since taken issue with this judgment, pointing especially to the London premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on August 3, 1955. In 2000 Dominic Shellard will marshall dissenting views in a effort to show that the importance attached to the event is “an enduring fallacy” (British Theatre in the 1950s). Pinter contributes the comment, “I never quite understood the definition of John Osborne as revolutionary writer, you know, part of a revolution in the English theatre, because I thought that that really should apply to Beckett. . . . What Beckett was doing had never been done before, as simple as that.”

November
Beckett’s Happy Days is staged at the Court a full year after its premiere in New York. A young Tom Stoppard reviews it for Scene and declares “The statement has left theatre behind. . . . Dramatically it is not enough.”

1964
March
During rehearsals of Beckett’s Play at the National Theatre, a controversy arises between Tynan and Devine, who is directing the play. Tynan notes that before Beckett began attending rehearsals, “The delivery of the lines was (rightly) puppet-like and mechanical, but not wholly dehumanised and stripped of all emphasis and inflections.” But since the playwright’s arrival, “the lines are chanted in a breakneck monotone with no inflections,” so that “many of them will be simply inaudible.” Devine replies that Beckett’s presence has been invaluable, and that “you’ll have to have a bit more guts if you really want to do experimental works.” Tynan retorts that Devine is expressing the viewpoint of a director’s theatre and a writer’s theatre, whereas he believes in “a theatre of intelligent audiences. . . . I thought we had outgrown the idea of a theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium. The ‘dramatic purpose” you mention involves, for me, communication and contact with a live audience. . . . So far from wanting to ‘turn the play into literature,’ I was proposing that we should liberate it from the author’s (to me) rather confined view of its dramatic possibilities.”

April

Beckett's half-hour cyclical drama Play is performed in London. In a sense a logical extension of Happy Days, the play startlingly exhibits the motionless heads of two females and one male protruding from identical urns. They dwell in a kind of purgatory where a "unique inquisitor," a spotlight that punctures the darkness by moving from face to face, provokes the characters to recall a sordid ménage à trois during their earthly existence, with no interaction or verification possible. The play concludes nebulously, but must then be repeated (with variations determined in rehearsal)and a second restart is mercifully cut short. The minimal plot and precise musical structure are qualities that recur in exaggerated form in Beckett's later stage plays, notably Not I (1972), That Time (1976), Footfalls (1976), Ohio Impromptu (1981), and Rockaby (1982). As Beckett deals with problems in the performances of Play in England, America, and France (where it is titled Comédie), he becomes more and more directly involved in overseeing them. One result is that he does not consider the texts of succeeding plays determined (and does not want them printed) until he has the experience of rehearsals behind him. This attitude carries over into already printed plays, so that he revises them in the light of rehearsals for new performances and finally collaborates with scholars in an attempt to produce definitive editions, printed as The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett.

1969
December

In an interview (in Vogue) occasioned by his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Beckett states, "If my work has any meaning at all, it is due more to ignorance, inability, and an intuitive despair than to any individual strength. I think that I have perhaps freed myself from certain formal concepts. Perhaps like the composer Schönberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have turned toward an abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have not tried to concretize the abstractionnot to give it yet another formal context." Later he comments, "Writing becomes not easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. Democritus pointed the way: 'Naught is more than nothing.'"

1976
November

Beckett tells the American musician Morton Feldman that there has been only one theme in his life: "To and fro in shadow, from outer shade to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self" (Buffalo News).

1983
June

Beckett's only stage play with political implications, the tiny one-act Catastrophe, is presented in New York. (He had written it in French in 1982 for the Avignon Festival's "nuit pour Václav Havel") Dedicated to the Czech playwright who had been imprisoned for dissident views, the play uses the imperious attitude of a theatre director toward an actor ("the Protagonist") as an analogy to the oppressive behavior of dictators. Beckett's wordless actor, pressured to be totally submissive and expressly forbidden to show his face, raises his head and looks toward the audience at the curtain. Beckett commented on a reviewer's opinion that the ending was ambiguous, "There's no ambiguity there at all. He's saying: you bastards, you haven't finished me yet!"

1989
December

Beckett dies on December 22 of emphysema and undernourishment.

Selective Bibliography of Samuel Beckett

The entire bibliography is largely restricted to readily available books and parts of books. The primary works are limited to the most essential from a scholarly viewpoint; secondary works are chosen less selectively, with an eye to the evolution of commentary as well as to quality and uniqueness. The books and parts of books are listed as follows: works by; reference works; collections of essays; biographical and critical works.

For a much fuller listing, including articles, essays in collections listed below, and material of foreign origin, consult bibliographies of the author plus:

Charles A. Carpenter. Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1966-1980: An International Bibliography and Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1981-1990: An International Bibliography. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1986, 1997

For more recent items, see the annual checklists of modern drama criticism from 1992 to 1999 in the journal Modern Drama, standard indexes of books and journals, and online resources such as WorldCat, Books in Print, MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures, Annual Bibliography of English Language Language and Literature, Academic Search Premier, Article First (FirstSearch), International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ), Google Scholar—Advanced Scholar Search, and the catalogs of university libraries and the Library of Congress.

[UP = University Press; Univ. = University; NY = New York]

Essential Volumes of Beckett’s Writings and Statements

Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. 4 vols. Ed. Paul Auster. NY: Grove Press, 2006:

Vols. I and II: Novels
Vol. III: Dramatic Works (introduction by Edward Albee)
Vol. IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism

I Can’t Go on, I’ll Go on: A Samuel Beckett Reader. NY: Grove Press, 1992 (621 pp.)

Waiting for Godot, with a Revised Text. Ed. Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson. NY: Grove Press, 1993 (“Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett,” vol. I)

Endgame, with a Revised Text. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. NY: Grove Press, 1992 (“Theatrical Notebooks,” vol. 2)

Krapp’s Last Tape, with a Revised Text. Ed. James Knowlson. NY: Grove Press, 1993 (“Theatrical Notebooks,” vol. 3)

The Shorter Plays, with Revised Texts for Footfalls, Come and Go, and What Where. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. NY: Grove Press, 1997 (“Theatrical Notebooks,” vol. IV)

Happy Days: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett. Ed. James Knowlson. London: Faber, 1985

Waiting for Godot, with an Afterword and Notes. Ed. John Fletcher. London: Faber, 1971

En attendant Godot. Ed. Germaine Brée and Eric Schoenfeld. NY: Macmillan, 1963

Happy Days / Oh les beaux jours: A Bilingual Edition with an Afterword and Notes. Ed. James Knowlson. London: Faber, 1978

The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1989. NY: Grove Press, 1997

Proust. NY: Grove Press, 1970

Poems, 1930-1989. London: Calder, 2002

No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett with Alan Schneider. Ed. Maurice Harmon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998

Conversations with and about Beckett. Ed. Mel Gussow. NY: Grove Press, 1996

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van der Velde / Charles Juliet. Tr. Janey Tucker, ed. Adriaan van der Weel and Ruud Hisgen. Leiden: Academic Press, 1995

Selective List of Books and Parts of Books About Beckett’s Life and Drama

I. Bibliographic and Reference Works

Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. NY: Grove Press, 2004 (a 686-page encyclopedia)

Admussen, Richard L. The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: A Study. London: Prior, 1979 (Descriptive catalog)

Andonian, Cathleen C. Samuel Beckett: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989

Bryer, Jackson R. “Samuel Beckett: A Checklist of Criticism.” Pp. 219-259 in Melvin J. Friedman, ed. Samuel Beckett Now: Critical Approaches to His Novels, Poetry, and Plays. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970

Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001 (Detailed chronology of his works with biographical sidelights and descriptive commentary)

Cooke, Virginia. Beckett on File. London: Methuen, 1985 (Data on each play)

Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher. Samuel Beckett, His Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970

Fletcher, John. About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber and Faber, 2003, 51-95: “Survey of Interviews Given by Beckett”; 139-214: interviews with Beckett’s collaborators and “those who took an independent line with Beckett’s works”

Hutchings, William. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005 (111-155: “Bibliographical Essay”)

Lake, Carlton, Linda Eichhorn, and Sally Leach. No Symbols Where None Intended: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Material Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collection of the Humanities Research Center. Austin: Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas, 1984

Murphy, Peter J., et al. Critique of Beckett Criticism: A Guide to Research in English, French, and German. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994

Pattie, David. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge, 2000 (Features a useful classified review of criticism, 103-202)

Pilling, John. A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

II. Collections of Essays (The separate essays are not analyzed in section III)

Acheson, James, and Kateryna Arthur, eds. Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1987

Andonian, Cathleen C., ed. The Critical Response to Samuel Beckett. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998 (Samples of the contemporary reception)

As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers. London: Calder, 1986

Beckett and Religion. Ed. Marius Buning et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000

Beckett in the 1990s. Ed. Marius Buning et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992

Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett. Ed. Alan W. Friedman et al. Univ. Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1987

Beckett Versus Beckett. Ed. Marius Buning et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998

Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed. Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Univ., Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, 2003

-----. Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990

-----, and Angela Moorjani, eds. Beckett at 100: Revolving it All. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008

Birkett, Jennifer, and Kate Ince, eds. Samuel Beckett. NY: Longman, 2000

Bloom, Harold, ed. Samuel Beckett: Modern Critical Views. NY: Chelsea, 1985

-----, ed. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame: Modern Critical Interpretations. NY: Chelsea, 1988

-----, ed. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: Modern Critical Interpretations. NY: Chelsea, 1987

Boxall, Peter, ed. Samuel Beckett. Duxford: Icon, 2000

Brater, Enoch, ed. Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context. NY: Oxford UP, 1986 (Essays on his drama)

-----., ed. The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995

Bryden, Mary, ed. Samuel Beckett and Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998

Burkman, Katherine H., ed. Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987

Butler, Lance St. J., ed. Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993

-----, and Robin J. Davis, eds. Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. NY: St. Martin’s, 1990

Calder, John, ed. Beckett at 60: A Festschrift. London: Calder & Boyars, 1967 (Essays, memoirs, and tributes)

Chevigny, Bell G., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Endgame: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969

Cohn, Ruby, ed. Casebook on Waiting for Godot. NY: Grove, 1967

-----, ed. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1975

-----, ed. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1987

Connor, Steven, ed. Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Samuel Beckett. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992

Davis, Robin J., and Lance St. J. Butler, eds. “Make Sense Who May”: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1988

Drew, Anne M., ed. Past Crimson, Past Woe: The Shakespeare-Beckett Connection. NY: Garland, 1993

Esslin, Martin, ed. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965

Friedman, Melvin J., ed. Samuel Beckett Now: Critical Approaches to His Novels, Poetry, and Plays. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970

Gontarski, Stanley E., ed. The Beckett Studies Reader (1976-1991). Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1993

-----, ed. On Beckett: Essays and Criticism. NY: Grove, 1986

-----, and Anthony Uhlmann, eds. Beckett After Beckett. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2006

Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979

Jeffers, Jennifer M., ed. Samuel Beckett: A Casebook. NY: Garland, 1998

Jenkins, Anthony, et al., eds. The Beckett Papers: University of Victoria Beckett Festival, 1996. Victoria, BC: Department of Theatre, Univ. of Victoria, 1997 (292 pp.)

Knowlson, James, ed. Theatre Workbook I: Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape. London: Brutus Books, 1980 (Reviews of performances; essays by directors, actors, and critics; notes on the text, and bibliography)

Lane, Richard, ed. Beckett and Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002

Marvel, Laura, ed. Readings on Waiting for Godot. Farmington Hills, CA: Greenhaven Press, 2001

McCarthy, Patrick A., ed. Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986

Moorjani, Angela, and Carola Veit, eds. Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001

Murray, Christopher, ed. Samuel Beckett: 100 Years: Centenary Essays. Dublin: New Island, 2006

Oppenheim, Lois, ed. Directing Beckett. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994

-----, ed. Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

-----, and Marius Buning, eds. Beckett on and on .... Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996

-----, and Daniel Albright, eds. Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media. NY: Garland, 1999

Pilling, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993 (Includes five essays on drama)

Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines. Ed. Marius Buning et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997

Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives. Ed. Morris Beja et al. Columbus, Ohio State UP, 1983

Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric. Ed. Edouard Morot-Sir et al. Chapel Hill: Dept. of Romance Languages, Univ. of North Carolina, 1976

Schlueter, June, and Enoch Brater, eds. Approaches to Teaching Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. NY: Modern Language Association, 1991

Smith, Joseph H., ed. The World of Samuel Beckett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991

Stewart, Bruce, ed. Beckett and Beyond. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1999

Tatlow, Antony, ed. Where Extremes Meet: Rereading Brecht and Beckett. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press for the International Brecht Society, 2002 (Includes six relevant essays)

Wilmer, S. E., ed. Beckett in Dublin. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992

Worth, Katherine, ed. Beckett the Shape Changer: A Symposium. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975

III. Biographical and Critical Works

Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996 (Includes extended studies of Eleutheria, Krapp’s Last Tape, Ohio Impromptu, and A Piece of Monologue)

-----. “Consorting with Spirits: The Arcane Craft of Beckett’s Later Drama.” Pp. 91-106 in Enoch Brater, ed. The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995

-----. “Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre.” Pp. 73-96 in Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, eds. Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1990

Acheson, James. “Beckett’s Happy Days, Burton, and Schopenhauer.” Pp. 85-96 in Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel, eds. Comparative Literary Dimensions: Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2000

-----. Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama, and Early Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997

Adorno, Theodore W. Notes to Literature, Vol. I. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann; tr. Shierry W. Nicholson. NY: Columbia UP, 1991, 241-275: “Trying to Understand Endgame

Albright, Daniel. Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003

Alter, Jean. “Waiting for the Reference, Waiting for Godot? On Referring in Theatre.” Pp. 42-56 in Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff, eds. On Referring in Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987

Alvarez, Alfred. Samuel Beckett. NY: Viking, 1973, 75-110: “The Plays: Carry on Talking”

Armstrong, Gordon S. “‘A Less Conscious Art’: Samuel Beckett and Scenic Art in the Eighties.” Pp. 111-125 in Claude Schumacher, ed. 40 Years of Mise en Scène, 1945-1985 / 40 Ans de Mise en Scène. Dundee: Lochee, 1986

-----. Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1990 (Stresses Beckett)

Aslan, Odette. Roger Blin and Twentieth-Century Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988, 23-54: “Beckett’s Plays”

Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1990, especially 114-187

Athanason, Arthur N. Endgame: The Ashbin Play. Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993

Atik, Anne. How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett. NY: Faber and Faber, 2001

Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1978 (First major biography)

Baker, Phil. Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998

Baldwin, Hélène L. Samuel Beckett’s Real Silence. Univ. Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1981, especially 107-124 on Waiting for Godot and 136-142 on Not I

Barnard, Guy C. Samuel Beckett: A New Approach: A Study of the Novels and Plays. London: Dent, 1970, 89-134: “The Plays”

Barr, Richard L. Rooms with a View: The Stages of Community in the Modern Theater. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998, 149-180: “Spinning Yarns and Social Ties: Connection, Collapse, and Community in Waiting for Godot

Barry, Elizabeth. Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 108-122: “The Myth of Hindsight: Beyond the End in Beckett’s Theatre” (on Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days)

Begam, Richard. Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996

Bentley, Eric. What Is Theatre? A Query in Chronicle Form. NY: Horizon Press, 1956, 148-158: “Undramatic Theatricality” (Counters Broadway critics’ views on Waiting for Godot)

Ben-Zvi, Linda. Samuel Beckett. Boston: Twayne, 1986

Berbes, Khaled. The Semiotics of Beckett’s Theatre: A Semiotic Study. Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2007

Berlin, Normand. The Secret Cause: A Discussion of Tragedy. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1981, 87-107: “Boundary Situation: King Lear and Waiting for Godot

Bermel, Albert. Contradictory Characters: An Interpretation of the Modern Theatre. NY: Dutton, 1973, 159-184: “Hero and Heroine as Topographical Features: Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961)”

Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993, 11-91 (38-49 on Endgame)

Birkett, Jennifer. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Basingstoke: Macmillan Educational, 1987

Bishop, Tom. From the Left Bank: Reflections on Modern French Theater and Novel. NY: NY UP, 1997, 194-211: “The loneliest Monologues: Beckett’s Theater in the 1970s”

Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987, 65-83: “The Bloody Show and the Eye of Prey [Beckett and deconstruction]”; 84-103: “Barthes and Beckett: The Punctum, the Pensum, and the Dream of Love”

-----. The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto. NY: Macmillan, 1964, 228-251 (Director’s point of view on Godot and Endgame)

-----. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000

Blin, Roger. “Roger Blin.” Pp. 21-40 in Alba Amoia, ed. Off-Stage Voices: Interviews with Modern French Dramatists. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1975 (Bettina Knapp interviews the director on Beckett and Genet)

Blumenthal, Eileen. Joseph Chaikin: Exploring at the Boundaries of Theater. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984, 185-207: “Directing Plays: Going from the Part to the Person’ (Almost all on his production of Endgame)

Bode, Christoph. “Dies zeigt sich: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Art.” Pp. 455-476 in Jürgen Kamm, ed. Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama in English: Festschrift for Heinz Kosok on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. Trier, Germany: WVT, 1999

Boxall, Peter. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame. Duxford: Icon, 2000

Boyce, Brynhildur. “The Negative Imprint of the Past in Samuel Beckett’s Embers and Not I.” Pp. 186-201 in Hedda Friberg et al., eds. Recovering Memory: Irish Representations of Past and Present. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007

Bradbrook, Muriel C. Literature in Action: Studies in Continental and Commonwealth Society. NY: Barnes & Noble, 1972, 13-33: “En attendant Godot”; also on pp. 173-186 in her Aspects of Dramatic Form in the English and Irish Renaissance. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983 (Compares French and English versions)

Bradby, David. Beckett: Waiting for Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001

Brandabur, A. Clare. “The Elephant in the Living-Room: A Postcolonial Reading of Waiting for Godot.” Pp. 121-151 in Clara A. B. Joseph and Janet Wilson, eds. Global Fissures, Postcolonial Fusions. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006

Brater, Enoch. Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater. NY: Oxford UP, 1987

-----. The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction. NY: Oxford UP, 1994, 14-57: ‘Acts of Enunciation’ (On the radio plays)

-----. The Essential Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Biography. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003 (Revision of Why Beckett, 1989)

Brereton, Geoffrey. Principles of Tragedy: A Rational Examination of the Tragic Concept in Life and Literature. Coral Gables, FL: Univ. of Miami Press, 1968, 244-265: “Waiting for Godot

Bronsen, David. “Consuming Struggle vs. Killing Time: Preludes to Dying in the Drama of Ibsen and Beckett.” Pp. 261-281 in Stuart F. Spiker et al., eds. Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978

Brown, John R. “Mr. Beckett’s Shakespeare.” Pp. 1-17 in C. B. Cox and D. J. Palmer, eds. Shakespeare’s Wide and Universal Stage. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984 (Derives a method of analyzing Shakespeare’s plays from the nature of Waiting for Godot)

Brownstein, Oscar L. Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form. NY: Greenwood Press, 1991, 139-164: “Complexity, Counterpoint, and Complicity” (On Waiting for Godot)

Bryden, Mary. Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, see index

-----. Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other. London: Macmillan, 1993, especially 70-135

Bull, John. “Looking Back at Godot.” Pp. 82-94 in Dominic Shellard, ed. British Theatre in the 1950s. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000

Buning, Marius. “Samuel Beckett’s Negative Way: Intimations of the via negativa in his Late Plays.” Pp. 129-142 in David Jasper and Colin Crowder, eds. European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century: Ends of Time. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990

Burkman, Katherine H. The Arrival of Godot: Ritual Patterns in Modern Drama. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1986, 33-53: “The Nonarrival of Godot: Initiation into the Sacred Void”; see also 72-80

Busi, Frederick A. The Transformations of Godot. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1980

Butler, Lance St. J. “Beckett’s Stage of Deconstruction.” Pp. 63-77 in Brian Docherty, ed. Twentieth-Century European Drama. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994

-----. “‘A Mythology with Which I Am Perfectly Familiar’: Samuel Beckett and the Absence of God.” Pp 169-84 in Robert Welch, ed. Irish Writers and Religion. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1992

-----. Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable. London: Macmillan, 1984

Calder, John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder, 1996

Campbell, James. Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank. NY: Scribner, 1995

Cantor, Jay. The Space Between: Literature and Politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981, 105-123: “Twenty-two (Broken) Notes on Samuel Beckett” (Most on Godot)

Caponi, Paolo. Adultery in the High Canon: Forms of Infidelity in Joyce, Beckett and Pinter. Milan: UNICOPLI, 2002, 57-76: “Repeat play” (On Play)

Carpenter, Charles A. Dramatists and the Bomb: American and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945-1964. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999, 136-143: “‘All those I might have helped’: Beckett's Endgame

Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1991, 141-158: “Two Responses to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: What Use Are Flowers? and ‘The Arrival of Mr. Todog’”

Catanzaro, Mary F. “Disconnected Bodies, Displaced Bodies: The Dismembered Couples in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days and Play.” Pp. 31-51 in Michael J. Meyer, ed. Literature and the Grotesque. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995

Cave, Richard A. New British Drama in Performance on the London Stage: 1970-1985. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1987, 101-132: “Monologues and Soliloquies: Samuel Beckett”

Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? NY: Scribner’s, 1969, 115-162: “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame

Chen, Fu-jen. “Godot and Buddha in Waiting for Godot.” Pp. 87-101 in Todd Burrell and Sean K. Kelly, eds. Translation: Religion, Ideology, Politics. Binghamton: State Univ. of NY Press, 1995

Chiari, Joseph. Landmarks of Contemporary Drama. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965, 68-80 (Stresses Waiting for Godot)

Christie, Ian, Juliet Stevenson, and Helen Taylor. “One in the Eye for Sam: Samuel Beckett’s Film (1964) and His Contribution to Our Vision in Theatre, Cinema and Psychoanalysis.” Pp. 35-52 in Andrea Sabbadini, ed. The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema. NY: Brunner-Routledge, 2003

Cochran, Robert. “There You Are Again: The Minimal Politics of Samuel Beckett.” Pp. 104-111 in C. C. Barfoot and Rias van den Doel, eds. Ritual Remembering: History, Myth and Politics in Anglo-Irish Drama. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995

Coe, Richard N. Samuel Beckett. NY: Grove, 1964 (118-page study of philosophical aspects of the fiction, with little reference to drama)

Cohn, Ruby. Back to Beckett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973, 122-219: “Plays Many Parts”

-----. From Desire to Godot: Pocket Theater of Postwar Paris. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987, 134-180: “Godot Cometh”

-----. Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980

-----. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976, 375-388: “Shakespearean Embers in Beckett”

-----. “Now Converging, Now Diverging: Beckett’s Metatheatre.” Pp. 91-107 in Nicole Boireau, ed. Drama on Drama: Dimensions of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997

-----. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1962, especially 208-259

-----. “Stage Triangles.” Pp. 71-84 in Ulf Lie and Anne H. Rønning, eds. Dialoguing on Genres: Essays in Honour of Andrew K. Kennedy on His 70th Birthday. Oslo: Novus Press, 2001

-----. “Warming Up for My Last Soliloquy.” Pp. 105-118 in Edouard Morot-Sir et al., eds. Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric. Chapel Hill: Dept. of Romance Languages, Univ. of North Carolina, 1976 (Stresses Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Not I)

Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, especially 115-169

Cook, Albert S. Prisms: Studies in Modern Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1967, 100-110, 140-147 (Modes of allegory and action in Waiting for Godot and Endgame)

Cormier, Ramona, and Janis L. Pallister. Waiting for Death: The Philosophical Significance of Beckett’s En attendant Godot. Univ.: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1979

Cornwell, Neil. The Absurd in Literature. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006, 215-50: “Samuel Beckett’s Vessels, Voices and Shades of the Absurd” (“The Drama,” 226-32)

Counsell, Colin. Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre. London: Routledge, 1996, 112-142: “Beckett and the Avant-Garde”

Cousineau, Thomas J. Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement. Boston: Twayne, 1990

Croall, Jonathan. The Coming of Godot: A Short History of a Masterpiece. London: Oberon, 2005

Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. NY: HarperCollins, 1997

Currie, Robert. Genius: An Ideology in Literature. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974, 171-193: “Beckett’s Transcendental Nihilism”

Dantanus, Ulf. “O’Neill’s Last Tape: Self, Failure and Freedom in Friel and Beckett.” Pp. 107-132 in Robert C. Evans, ed. A Companion to Brian Friel. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2002

Davies, Paul. Beckett and Eros: Death of Humanism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000

Dearlove, Judith E. Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art. Durham: Duke UP, 1982

Demastes, William W. Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2002, 59-65: “Beckettian Consciousness”

-----. Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, into Orderly Disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, 56-64 and see index

Dobrez, Livio A. C. The Existential and Its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet & Pinter. London: Athlone, 1986, 7-128: “The Beckett Irreducible”; 261-280: “Beckett: The Task of Saying Nothing”

-----. “To End Yet Again: Samuel Beckett’s Recent Work.” Pp.130-146 in Ian Donaldson, ed. Transformations in Modern European Drama. London: Macmillan, 1983

Doherty, Francis. Samuel Beckett. London: Hutchinson Univ. Library, 1971, 86-118: “Theatre of Suffering”

Doll, Mary A. Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1988

Duckworth, Colin. Angels of Darkness: Dramatic Effect in Samuel Beckett, with Special Reference to Eugène Ionesco. London: Allen & Unwin, 1972

-----. “Introduction.” Pp. xvii-cxxxi in Duckworth, ed. En attendant Godot. London: Harrap, 1966 (Detailed textual and critical study)

Dukes, Gerry. Samuel Beckett. NY: Penguin, 2001 (Brief illustrated account)

Dutton, Richard. Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee and Storey. Brighton: Harvester, 1986, 55-89 (On Godot and Endgame)

Eliopulos, James. Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1975

Engelberts, Matthijs. “A Glimpse of the Self: Defence of Subjectivity in Beckett and his Later Theatre.” Pp. 107-167 in Willem Reijen and Willem G. Weststeijn, eds. Subjectivity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000

Essif, Les. Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001

Esslin, Martin. Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980, 125-154: “Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting”

-----. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3rd ed. London: Methuen, 1980, 29-91: “Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self”

-----. “Visions of Absence: Beckett’s Footfalls, Ghost Trio and ... but the clouds ... .” Pp. 119-129 in Ian Donaldson, ed. Transformations in Modern European Drama. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983

Fischer-Seidel, Therese. “‘Esse est percipi’: Visual Perception in Samuel Beckett’s Film, Eh Joe and Nacht und Träume.” Pp. 235-258 in Fischer-Seidel et al., eds. Perception and the Senses: Sinneswahrnehmung. Tübingen: Francke, 2004

Fletcher, Beryl S. and John. A Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett. 2nd ed. London: Faber, 1985 (Valuable notes)

Fletcher, John. About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber, 2003

-----. Samuel Beckett’s Art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967, 41-82: “The Art of the Dramatist”

-----, and John Spurling. Beckett the Playwright. 3rd ed. London: Methuen, 1985

-----, and John Spurling. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape. London: Faber and Faber, 2000

Fowlie, Wallace. “Dante and Beckett.” Pp. 128-152 in Stuart Y. McDougal, ed. Dante Among the Moderns. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985

Friedman, Alan W. Party Pieces: Oral Storytelling and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 107-142: “Vying for Center Stage in Beckett’s Early Plays”; 143-179: “Performers and Antiperformers in Beckett’s Dramaticules” (Latter chapter treats most of the later plays)

Gaensbauer, Deborah B. The French Theater of the Absurd. Boston: Twayne, 1991, 23-42: “Samuel Beckett”

Garner, Stanton B. The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989, 148-169: “Not I and Footfalls: Beckett and the Edges of Narrative”

-----. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994, 18-39, 52-86, 107-110, 131-136

Gidal, Peter. Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett. London: Macmillan, 1986

Gilman, Richard. The Making of Modern Drama: A Study of Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Handke. NY: Farrar, Straus, 1974, 234-266

Glicksberg, Charles I. The Self in Modern Literature. Univ. Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1963, 117-133: “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: The Lost Self in Beckett’s Fiction”

Gluck, Barbara R. Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1979, 141-163: “‘Me to Play’” (On Godot and Endgame)

Gontarski, Stanley E. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Libraries, 1977

-----. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985 (“Textual biography”)

-----. “Introduction.” Pp. vii-xxvi in Beckett. Eleuthéria: A Play in Three Acts. NY: Foxrock, 1995

-----. “Introduction: De-Theatricalizing Theatre: The Post-Play Plays.” Pp. xv-xxix in Beckett. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: The Shorter Plays, with Revised Texts for Footfalls, Come and Go and What Where. Ed. Gontarski. London: Faber & Faber, 1999

Gordon, Lois. “No Exit and Waiting for Godot: Performances in Contrast.” Pp. 166-188 in Thomas Fahy and Kimball King, eds. Captive Audience: Prison and Captivity in Contemporary Theater. NY: Routledge, 2003

-----. Reading Godot. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002

-----. The World of Samuel Beckett: 1906-1946. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996

Graver, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004

Grawe, Paul H. Comedy in Space, Time and the Imagination. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983, 237-249: “Beckett’s Changing Faith” (On Waiting for Godot and Endgame)

Griffith, Peter. “Bakhtin, Foucault, Beckett, Pinter.” Pp. 97-114 in Adrian Page, ed. The Death of the Playwright? Modern British Drama and Literary Theory. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992 (On Waiting for Godot)

Grossvogel, David I. Four Playwrights and a Postscript: Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1962, 87-131 (Also entitled Blasphemers)

Gruber, William E. “Empire of Light: Luminosity and Space in Beckett’s Theater.” Pp. 33-47 in Kimball King, ed. Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights. NY: Routledge, 2001

-----. Missing Persons: Character and Characterization in Modern Drama. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994, 75-107: “Character Portraits / Portraying Character: Krapp’s Last Tape, Rockaby, Catastrophe

Guicharnaud, Jacques, with June Beckelman. Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Genet. Rev. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967, 230-258: “Existence Onstage: Samuel Beckett”

Gupta, Suman. “Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.” Pp. 210-261 in David Johnson, ed. The Popular and the Canonical: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1940-2000. London: Routledge with Open Univ., 2005

Guralnick, Elissa S. Sight Unseen: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995

Hale, Jane A. The Broken Window: Beckett’s Dramatic Perspective. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1987

Hamilton, Alice and Kenneth. Condemned to Life: The World of Samuel Beckett. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976, 156-176: “Mortal Tedium”

Hanson, Gillian M. Riverbank and Seashore in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006, 102-129: “The Urban Shore” (Part on Embers)

Harding, James M. Adorno and “a Writing of the Ruins”: Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture. Albany: New York State UP, 1997, 51-64: “Trying to Understand Godot: Adorno, Beckett, and the Senility of Dialectics”

Harrington, John P. The Irish Beckett. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1991, especially 171-186

-----. The Irish Play on the New York Stage, 1874-1966. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1997, 123-144: “Waiting for Godot in New York

-----. “Samuel Beckett and the Countertradition.” Pp. 164-176 in Shaun Richards, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004

Hart, Clive. Language and Structure in Beckett’s Plays: A Lecture. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1986 (36 pp.)

Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett, Poet & Critic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970 (Very little on the plays)

Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. NY: Knopf, 1967, 174-200: “Acts Without Words”

Hauck, Gerhard. Reductionism in Drama and the Theatre: The Case of Samuel Beckett. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1992

Hawcroft, Michael. Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999, 108-119: “Rhetoric in a Void: Beckett’s En attendant Godot

Hayman, Ronald. Samuel Beckett. 3rd ed. London: Heinemann, 1980 (Introductory)

-----. Theatre and Anti-Theatre: New Movements Since Beckett. NY: Oxford UP, 1979, 1-16: “Godot and After”; 17-47: “Beckett and Before”

Henning, Sylvie D. Beckett’s Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1988, 85-158

Herren, Graley. Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Hesla, David H. The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971, 129-166: “Time, Ground, and the End: Drama”

Hibon, Bernard. “Samuel Beckett: Irish Tradition and Irish Creation.” Pp. 225-241 in Patrick Rafroidi, ed. Aspects of the Irish Theater. Paris: Editions Universitaires, Publications de l’Université de Lille, 1972

Hoffman, Frederick J. Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1962, 138-159

Homan, Sidney. The Audience as Actor and Character: The Modern Theater of Beckett, Brecht, Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, Stoppard, and Williams. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1989, 134-149: “Beckett, Nacht und Träume, Catastrophe, What Where, and Quad: ‘Make Sense Who May’”

-----. Beckett’s Theaters: Interpretations for Performance. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1984

-----. Filming Beckett’s Television Plays: A Director’s Experience. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1992

Hoy, Cyrus. The Hyacinth Room: An Investigation into the Nature of Comedy, Tragedy, and Tragicomedy. NY: Knopf, 1964, 254-264

Innes, Christopher. Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981, 202-215: “Ionesco and Beckett”

-----. Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 306-328: “Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): Interior Space and Play as Image” (Update of the 1992 edition)

Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989, 152-193: “The Art of Failure: The Stifled Laughter in Beckett’s Theater”

Jacobsen, Josephine, and William R. Mueller. The Testament of Samuel Beckett. NY: Hill & Wang, 1964; see also their essay, “Samuel Beckett’s Long Saturday: To Wait or Not to Wait.” Pp. 76-97 in Nathan A. Scott, ed. Man in the Modern Theatre. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1965

Johnson, Patricia J. A Gallery of Mirrors: Mask and Reality in Contemporary French Theater. Parma: CEM, 1975, 85-98 (Stresses Waiting for Godot)

Johnson, Toni O. “[Synge’s] The Well of the Saints and Waiting for Godot: Stylistic Variations on a Tradition.” Pp. 90-102 in Maurice Harmon, ed. The Irish Writer and the City. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1984

Jones, David H. The Body Abject: Self and Text in Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. NY: Lang, 2000

Junker, Mary. Beckett: The Irish Dimension. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997

Kaelin, Eugene F. The Unhappy Consciousness: The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett: An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1981, especially 157-268

Kalb, Jonathan. Beckett in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989

-----. Play by Play: Theater Essays and Reviews, 1993-2002. NY: Limelight Editions, 2003, 39-79: “Something the Dust Said” (Reviews of Eleutheria and Waiting for Godot, plus other reviews)

Kane, Leslie. The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1984, 105-131 (Mostly on Godot)

Kantra, Robert A. All Things Vain: Religious Satirists and Their Art. Univ. Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1984, 154-173: “Waiting for Godot: Beckett and Eliot”

Kearney, Richard. “Beckett: The Demythologizing Intellect.” Pp. 267-293 in Kearney, ed. The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985

Keller, John R. Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002, 133-171: “A Strange Situation: Self-Entrapment in Waiting for Godot

Kennedy, Andrew K. Samuel Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989

-----. Six Dramatists in Search of a Language: Studies in Dramatic Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975, 130-164

Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. NY: Farrar, Straus, 1973, especially 23-38, 120-135, 147-175

-----. Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study. Rev. ed. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968, 133-187

Killinger, John. World in Collapse: The Vision of Absurd Drama. NY: Dell, 1971, 16-26

Kilroy, Thomas. “Two Playwrights: Yeats and Beckett.” Pp. 183-195 in Joseph Ronsley, ed. Myth and Reality in Irish Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier UP, 1977

Kim, Hwa Soon. The Counterpoint of Hope, Obsession, and Desire for Death in Five Plays by Samuel Beckett. NY: Lang, 1996

Klimenko, Svetlana. The Stuff that Plays are Made of: Linguistic Approaches to the Interpretation of Post-War British Drama with Special Reference to the Linguopoetic Method. Copenhagen: Multivers, 2003, 91-127: ‘Samuel Beckett’ (On Waiting for Godot)

Knapp, Bettina L. Exile and the Writer: Exoteric and Esoteric Experiences: A Jungian Approach. Univ. Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991, 193-211: “Beckett’s That Time: Exile and ‘that Double-Headed Monster ... Time’”

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 (Fullest and best biography to date)

-----. Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett. London: Turret Books, 1972 (41 pp.)

-----, ed. Happy Days / O les beaux jours: A Bilingual Edition with an Afterword and Notes. London: Faber, 1978 (Critical apparatus, 84-149)

-----, and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds. Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett: Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett and Memories of Those Who Knew Him. London: Bloomsbury, 2006

-----, and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder, 1979

Kolenda, Konstantin. Philosophy in Literature: Metaphysical Darkness and Ethical Light. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982, 147-163: “Meanings Exhausted: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London: Methuen, 1964, 101-137: “King Lear or Endgame

Kowsar, Mohammad. The Critical Panopticon: Essays in the Theatre and Contemporary Aesthetics. NY: Lang, 1991, 85-106: “The Time of Samuel Beckett’s That Time

Kozdon, Sabine. Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Plays: A Psychological Approach. Münster: LIT, 2005

Kundert-Gibbs, John L. No-thing Is Left to Tell: Zen / Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999

-----. “Revolving it All: Mother-Daughter Pairs in Marsha Norman’s ’night Mother and Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls.” Pp. 47-62 in Linda G. Brown, ed. Marsha Norman: A Casebook. NY: Garland, 1996

Lahr, John. Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr. NY: Knopf, 1969, 253-282: “Waiting for Godot

-----. Up Against the Fourth Wall: Essays on Modern Theater. NY, Grove Press, 1973, 50-77: “The Language of Silence” (On late Pinter and Beckett)

Lamont, Rosette C. “Samuel Beckett’s Wandering Jew.” Pp. 35-53 in Randolph L. Braham, ed. Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 1990 (Gogo)

Lane, Richard. “Beckett and Nietzsche: The Eternal Headache.” Pp. 166-176 in Lane, ed. Beckett and Philosophy. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2002 (Part on Krapp’s Last Tape)

Langbaum, Robert W. The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature. NY: Oxford UP, 1977, 120-144: “Beckett: Zero Identity” (On the plays, especially Godot)

Lawley, Paul. Waiting for Godot: Character Studies. London: Continuum, 2008

Layiwola, Dele. “Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of Deconstruction: An Exegesis on Form.” Pp. 75-86 in Joseph McMinn, ed. The Internationalism of Irish Literature and Drama. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1992

Levy, Shimon. Samuel Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama: The Sensitive Chaos. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002 (New expanded edition of Samuel Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama: The Three I’s. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990)

-----. Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2006

Little, Janet P. Beckett: En attendant Godot and Fin de partie. London: Grant & Cutler, 1981

Locatelli, Carla. “Delogocentering Silence: Beckett’s Ultimate Unwording.” Pp. 67-89 in Enoch Brater, ed. The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995

Luere, Jeane. “A Playwright-Director Opens up a Classic: Albee’s Direction of Beckett.” Pp. 107-119 in Luere, ed. Playwright Versus Director: Authorial Intention and Performance Interpretations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994 (Productions of Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu)

Lutterbie, John H. Hearing Voices: Modern Drama and the Problem of Subjectivity. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997, 115-149: “Toward a Theory of Subjectivity” (Stresses Not I)

Lyons, Charles R. “Beckett, Shakespeare, and the Making of Theory.” Pp. 97-127 in Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, eds. Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1990

-----. “Fin de partie / Endgame as Political Drama.” Pp. 188-208 in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells, eds. Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991

-----. Samuel Beckett. London: Macmillan, 1983 (On his dramatic works)

Malkin, Jeanette R. Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999, 37-69: “Samuel Beckett’s Postures of Memory”

Mapp, Nigel. “No Nature, No Nothing: Adorno, Beckett, Disenchantment.” Pp. 159-170 in David Cunningham and Mapp, eds. Adorno and Literature. London: Continuum, 2006

Marker, Frederick J., and Christopher Innes, eds. Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett: Essays from [the journal] Modern Drama. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998 (Includes seven essays on Beckett)

Matthews, Honor. The Hard Journey: The Myth of Man’s Rebirth. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968, 139-168: “Samuel Beckett: The Ambiguous Journey” (Stresses fiction)

-----. The Primal Curse: The Myth of Cain and Abel in the Theatre. NY: Schocken Books, 1967, 152-168: “Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka: The Ambiguous Directive”

Maxwell, D. E. S. A Critical History of Irish Drama, 1891-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984, 188-200: “The Honour of Naming: Samuel Beckett . . . .”

-----. “J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett.” Pp. 25-38 in Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley, eds. Across a Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1985

Mayberry, Bob. Theatre of Discord: Dissonance in Beckett, Albee, and Pinter. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989, 20-33: “The Battle of Lights and Voices: Beckett’s Play and Breath

Mayoux, Jean J. Samuel Beckett. Harlow: Longman, 1974 (48 pp.)

McDonald, Ronan. The Cambridge introduction to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006

-----. Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O'Casey, Beckett. NY: Palgrave, 2002, 127-171: “Beyond Tragedy: Samuel Beckett and the Art of Confusion”

McManus, Donald. No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2003, 71-89: “Clown in Beckett’s Theater: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Act Without Words

McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, Volume I: From Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape. London: Calder, 1988

McMullan, Anna. “From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis)embodiment in Beckett’s Theatre.” Pp. 97-108 in Melissa Sihra, ed. Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

-----. Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama. NY: Routledge, 1993

McMullan, Audrey. “The Eye of Judgement: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama.” Pp. 82-96 in Adrian Page, ed. The Death of the Playwright? Modern British Drama and Literary Theory. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992

Megged, Matti. Dialogue in the Void: Beckett and Giacometti. NY: Lumen, 1985

Mélèse, Pierre. Samuel Beckett. Paris: Seghers, 1966 (Detailed account [in French] of the plays and their performances in Paris)

Mendelson, Edward. “The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Endgame.” Pp. 336-352 in Michael Seidel and Mendelson, eds. Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1977

Mercier, Vivian. “All That Fall: Samuel Beckett and the Bible.” Pp. 360-373 in Susan Dick et al., eds. Omnium Gatherum: Essays for Richard Ellmann. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1989

-----. Beckett / Beckett. NY: Oxford UP, 1977, see index (Antinomies in his work)

Minihan, John. Samuel Beckett: Centenary Shadows. London: Robert Hale, 2006

Mooney, Sinéad. Samuel Beckett. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2005 (144 pp.)

Morrison, Kristin. Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983, especially 9-141

-----. “Defeated Sexuality in the Plays and Novels of Samuel Beckett.” Pp. 223-239 in Clifford Davidson et al., eds. Drama in the Twentieth Century: Comparative and Critical Essays. NY: AMS Press, 1984

Morse, Donald E. “‘Fidelity to Failure’: Time and the Fantastic in Samuel Beckett’s Early Plays.” Pp. 167-178 in Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha, eds. More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts. NY: Greenwood Press, 1991

Mueller, William R., and Josephine Jacobsen. “Samuel Beckett’s Long Saturday: To Wait or Not to Wait?” Pp. 76-97 in Nathan A. Scott, ed. Man in the Modern Theatre. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1965

Murphy, Daniel. Imagination & Religion in Anglo-Irish Literature 1930-1980. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987, 148-175: “Astride a Grave: Samuel Beckett’s Novels, Poems and Plays”

Murphy, John L. “Beckett’s Purgatories.” Pp. 109-24 in Colleen Jaurretche, ed. Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005

Murray, Patrick. The Tragic Comedian: A Study of Samuel Beckett. Cork: Mercier, 1970, 64-82: “The Dramatist: Journey into Silence”

Natanson, Maurice. The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998, 63-83: “Waiting for Godot

Nightingale, Benedict. A Reader’s Guide to Fifty Modern British Plays. London: Heinemann, 1982, 258-284 (Three plays are chosen for description: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Not I)

Norrish, Peter. New Tragedy and Comedy in France 1945-70. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, 61-75: “Samuel Beckett: New Tragedy”

O’Hara, J. D. Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998

Okebaram Uwah, Godwin. Pirandellism and Samuel Beckett’s Plays. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1989

Olsen, Lance. “Beckett and the Horrific.” Pp. 116-126 in Patrick D. Murphy, ed. Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992

O’Nan, Martha. The Role of Mind in Hugo, Faulkner, Beckett and Grass. NY: Philosophical Library, 1969, 23-35: “Samuel Beckett’s Lucky: Damned”

Oppenheim, Lois. The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000

-----. “The Uncanny in Beckett.” Pp. 125-140 in Colleen Jaurretche, ed. Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005

Orr, John. Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture: Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1991, 47-71: “Samuel Beckett: Imprisoned Persona and Irish Amnesia”

Pattie, David. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge, 2000 (Introductory)

Peter, John. Vladimir’s Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagination. London: Deutsch, 1987, see index

Pilling, John. Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 (Biographical)

-----. Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, 67-109: “Drama for Stage, Screen and Radio”

Popovic Karic, Pol. Ironic Samuel Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Life and Drama: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2006

Pountney, Rosemary. Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama, 1956-76: from All That Fall to Footfalls, with Commentaries on the Latest Plays. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1988

Pronko, Leonard C. Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater in France. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962, 22-58; see also 112-153: “Theater and Anti-Theater,” on Ionesco and Beckett

Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002, 157-172: “Samuel Beckett: Actors in Barrels and Gestures in the Text”

Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. NY: Columbia UP, 2007, 54-85: “Samuel Beckett: Disability as Hermeneutical Impasse”; 64-85: “Endgame and the Play of Contingency”

Quigley, Austin E. The Modern Stage and Other Worlds. NY: Methuen, 1985, 199-220: “Krapp’s Last Tape

Raben, Estelle M. Major Strategies in Twentieth Century Drama: Apocalyptic Vision, Allegory and Open Form. NY: Lang, 1989, 95-134: “Witkiewicz and Beckett” (The Water Hen and Endgame)

Raghavan, Hema V. Samuel Beckett: Rebels and Exiles in His Plays. Liverpool: Lucas, 1988

Rayner, Alice. To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994, 41-57: “To Act: ‘Did that never happen to you?’” (On Waiting for Godot)

Reid, Alec. All I Can Manage, More Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett. 2nd ed. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1968

Reinelt, Janelle. “Approaching the Postmodernist Threshold: Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht.” Pp. 337-358 in Ronald Roblin, ed. The Aesthetics of the Critical Theorists. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990

Reinersdorff-Paczensky und Tenczin, Uta von. W. B. Yeats’s Poetry and Drama Between Late Romanticism and Modernism: An Analysis of Yeats’s Poetry and Drama. Frankfurt: Lang, 1996, 223-42: “Yeats and Beckett: A Revolutionary Notion of Drama”

Reiter, Seymour. World Theater: The Structure and Meaning of Drama. NY: Horizon, 1973, 214-228: “Submerged Structure in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Restivo, Giuseppina. “Figurative Parallels in Joyce and Beckett.” Pp. 89-104 in Daniela Carpi, ed. Literature and Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century. Bologna: Re Enzo, 2001 (Endgame’s affinites with Exiles and Ulysses)

Rexroth, Kenneth. Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays. NY: New Directions, 1959, 75-85: “Samuel Beckett and the Importance of Waiting”

Ricks, Christopher. Beckett’s Dying Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 153-203: “The Irish Bull”

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Tr. Richard Howard. NY: Grove Press, 1965,111-125: “Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’ on the Stage”

Robinson, James E. “Samuel Beckett’s Doomsday Play: The Space of Infinity.” Pp. 215-227 in The Theatrical Space. Themes in Drama, 9. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987 (On several plays)

Robinson, Michael. The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett. NY: Grove Press, 1970, 229-297: “The Theatre”

Roche, Anthony. Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuiness. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995, 13-35: “Beckett and Yeats: Among the Dreaming Shades”; 36-71: “Beckett and Behan: Waiting for Your Man”

Rodríguez-Gago, Antonia. “Molly’s ‘happy nights’ and Winnie’s ‘happy days.’” Pp. 29-40 in Enoch Brater, ed. The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995

Rollins, Ronald G. Divided Ireland: Bifocal Vision in Modern Irish Drama. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1985, 28-44: “Yeats and Beckett: Old Men and Memories”; repr. in his Ruin, Ritual and Remembrance in Twentieth Century Irish Drama. Dublin: Maunsel, 2001, 47-68 (Purgatory and Krapp’s Last Tape; 1978 essay); 61-79: “Friel’s Crystal and Beckett’s All That Fall: The Odd Couples in Fable and Paradox”; repr. in Ruin, Ritual and Remembrance in Twentieth Century Irish Drama,107-18

Roof, Judith. “Playing Outside with Samuel Beckett.” Pp. 146-159 in Stephen Watt et al., eds. A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000

Rosen, Steven J. Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1976, see index

Rusinko, Susan. British Drama 1950 to the Present: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1989, 20-34: “Samuel Beckett: Reductionist”

Rustin, Margaret, and Michael Rustin. Mirror to Nature: Drama, Psychoanalysis, and Society. London: Karnac, 2002, 218-238: “Beckett: Dramas of Psychic Catastrophe” (treats Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days)

Schlueter, June. Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama. NY: Columbia UP, 1979, 53-69: “Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov”

Schneider, Alan. “On Directing Film.” Pp. 63-94 in Beckett. Film. NY: Grove Press, 1969

-----. “Working with Beckett.” Pp. 271-289 in Edouard Morot-Sir et al., eds. Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric. Chapel Hill: Dept. of Romance Languages, Univ. of North Carolina, 1976

Schneiderman, Leo. The Literary Mind: Portraits in Pain and Creativity. NY: Insight Books, Human Sciences Press, 1988, 163-185: “Samuel Beckett: on the borderline”

Schwab, Gabriele. “On the Dialectic of Closing and Opening in Samuel Beckett’s End-game.” Pp. 191-202 in D. L. Selden, ed. Concepts of Closure. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1984

Schwarz, Alfred. From Büchner to Beckett: Dramatic Theory and the Modes of Tragic Drama. Athens: Ohio UP, 1978, 343-355

Scott, Nathan A. Samuel Beckett. 2nd ed. London: Bowes, 1969 (Chapters VIII and IX focus on drama)

Segre, Cesare. Structures and Time: Narration, Poetry, Models. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979, 225-244: “The Function of Language in Samuel Beckett’s Actes sans paroles

Sherzer, Dina. “De-construction in Waiting for Godot.” Pp. 129-146 in Barbara A. Babcock, ed. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978

Simon, Bennett. Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1988, 212-252: “Beckett’s Endgame and the Abortion of Desire”

Simpson, Alan. Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin. London: Routledge, 1962, 62-137 and passim. (Staging at the Pike Theatre)

Smith, Frederik N. Beckett’s Eighteenth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002

States, Bert O. The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978

Sternlicht, Stanford. “Samuel Beckett.” Pp. 237-265 in W. E. Kidd, ed. British Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1973

Styan, J. L. The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968, 217-234: “Beckett and the Absurd” and “Waiting for Godot: An Analytic Note on Performance”

Swanson, Roy A. Heart of Reason: Introductory Essays in Modern-World Humanities. Minneapolis, MI: Denison, 1963, 187-207: “Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Swerling, Anthony. Strindberg’s Impact in France 1920-1960. Cambridge: Trinity Lane, 1971, 111-135: “Beckett’s En attendant Godot and Fin de partie

Szafraniec, Asja. Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007

Szanto, George H. Theater and Propaganda. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1978, 145-177: “Samuel Beckett and Dramatic Possibilities in an Age of Technological Retention”

Tajiri, Yoshiki. Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Takahashi, Yasunari. “Memory inscribed in the body: Krapp’s Last Tape and the Noh Play Izutsu.” Pp. 51-65 in Enoch Brater, ed. The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995

Tharu, Susie J. The Sense of Performance: Post-Artaud Theatre. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984, 87-119: “Samuel Beckett: Revealing a World as Deprived as His Stage”

Tönnies, Merle. Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Strategy: Audience Laughter and the Postmodernist Debate. Trier: WVT, 1997

Tonning, Erik. Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen, 1962-1985. Bern: Lang, 2007

Topsfield, Valerie. The Humour of Samuel Beckett. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988

Uhlmann, Anthony. Beckett and Poststructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999

-----. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006

Ulin, Julieann. “‘Buried! Who Would Have Buried Her?”: Famine ‘Ghost Graves’ in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.” Pp. 197-222 in George Cusack and Sarah Goss, eds. Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon. Dublin: Irish Academic, 2005

Uwah, Godwin O. Pirandellism and Samuel Beckett’s Plays. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1989

Valency, Maurice. The End of the World: An Introduction to Contemporary Drama. NY: Oxford UP, 1980, 388-418: “Beckett”

Vanden Heuvel, Michael. Performing Drama / Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1991, 67-95: “‘The Sad Tale a Last Time Told’: Closing Performance and Liberating the Text in the Plays of Samuel Beckett”

Vos, Nelvin. The Great Pendulum of Becoming: Images in Modern Drama. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian UP, 1980, 93-109: “The Drama of Performing: The Locus of Beckett’s Theatre”; see also 125-128

Warner, Francis. “The Absence of Nationalism in the Work of Samuel Beckett.” Pp. 179-204 in Robert O’Driscoll, ed. Theater and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Ireland. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1971

Watson, G. J. Drama: An Introduction. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, 171-197: “Beckett and Pinter: Empty Spaces and Closed Rooms” (171-185 on Beckett)

Watt, Stephen M. Postmodern / Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998, 65-87: “A Peristalsis of Dim Light: Joyce, Beckett, and Postmodernism”

Webb, Eugene. The Plays of Samuel Beckett. London: Owen, 1972

Weiss, Katherine. “Mechanization and the Mechanized Eye in Beckett’s Play and Film.” Pp. 219-235 in Corrado Federici and Esther Raventós-Pons, eds. Literary Texts and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. NY: Lang, 2003

Weller, Shane. Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

-----. A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. London: Legenda, 2005

Wellwarth, George E. The Theater of Protest and Paradox: Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama. Rev ed. NY: NY UP, 1971, 41-56: “Samuel Beckett: Life in the Void”

Wheatley, David. Mirrors of our Playing: Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999, 109-136: “Playing Hell: Sartre, Beckett, Genet, and Pinter”

-----. “Undecidable Imperatives: Notes on Beckett in the Modern and Postmodern.” Pp. 127-158 in John S. Rickard, ed. Irishness and (Post)modernism. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994

Whitaker, Thomas R. Fields of Play in Modern Drama. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977, 17-24 (On Happy Days), 114-120 (On Endgame)

-----. Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999, 109-136: “Playing Hell: Sartre, Beckett, Genet, and Pinter”; 181-205: “Wham, Bam, Thank You Sam”

Winkler, Elizabeth H. The Clown in Modern Anglo-Irish Drama. Bern: Lang, 1977, 205-252: “The Clown and the Absurd: Samuel Beckett”

Worth, Katharine J. “Beckett and the Radio Medium.” Pp. 191-217 in John Drakakis, ed. British Radio Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981

-----. “Greek Notes in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre Art.” Pp. 265-283 in Edith Hall et al., eds. Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millenium. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004

-----. The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978, 241-265: “Beckett”

-----. Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999

-----. “Scenic Imagery in the Plays of Yeats and Beckett.” Pp. 218-232 in Masaru Sekine, ed. Irish Writers and the Theatre. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1986

-----. Waiting for Godot and Happy Days: Text and Performance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990

Worthen, W. B. Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992, 131-142: “The Discipline of the Text: Beckett’s Theater”

Wulf, Catherina. The Imperative of Narration: Beckett, Bernhard, Schopenhauer, Lacan. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1997, especially 96-120: “The Wheels of Desire in the Plays”

Wynands, Sandra. Iconic Spaces: The Dark Theology of Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007

Young, Jordan R. The Beckett Actor: Jack MacGowran, Beginning to End. Beverly Hills, CA: Moonstone, 1987

Zilliacus, Clas. Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television. Abo, Finland: Abo Academi, 1976

 

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