Van Der Ziel, Stanley (2019) Godot’s Shakespeare. Irish Studies Review, 27 (1). pp. 38-55. ISSN 0967-0882

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Abstract

While the connection between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and King Lear has become something of a critical commonplace, references to other Shakespeare plays can also be found throughout. This essay traces Godot’s debt to two plays in particular. First it argues how Godot not only draws on Hamlet’s graveyard scene for macabre imagery, but how it also construes an extended metatheatrical parody of Hamlet’s soliloquies about the contrast between acting and talking/thinking. The second half of the essay proposes a number of connections with The Tempest, and specifically with its “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban. It argues how the figure of Caliban not merely functions as a model for a colonial power-dynamic that can be seen to operate here and elsewhere in Beckett, but how Caliban is equally significant as a lyrical figure whose great speech about sleeping, waking, and dreaming informs Beckett’s play in a number of ways.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Samuel Beckett; William Shakespeare; Waiting for Godot; intertextuality; postcolonial; soliloquy;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > English
Item ID:	13243
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2018.1555401
Depositing User:	IR Editor
Date Deposited:	17 Sep 2020 11:13
Journal or Publication Title:	Irish Studies Review
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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