Shakespeare and Beckett

This unique study is the first monograph on the manifold intertextual relations and poetic echoes between Shakespeare and Beckett.

Claudia Olk (Author)

9781316514030, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 2023

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.51 kg

'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both œuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.

1. Shakespeare and Beckett on the Edges
2. Molecular Shakespeare – Beckett reading Shakespeare through Joyce
3. 'Some remains': Beckettian and Shakespearean Echoes
4. Purgatory and Pause –Shakespeare, Dante and the Lobster
5. '[It is]winter/Without journey' – Still Lifes in Beckett and Shakespeare
6. Endgames
7. Theatres of Sleep.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Theatre studies [AN]