Beckett, Samuel - Ruby Cohn (essay date spring-summer 1962)
Ruby Cohn (essay date spring-summer 1962)
SOURCE: Cohn, Ruby. “Play and Player in the Plays of Samuel Beckett.” Yale French Studies 29 (spring-summer 1962): 43-8.
[In the following essay, Cohn studies the layers of reality and unreality in Beckett's plays and discusses the characters' awareness of the symbiotic nature of these (un)realities.]
Plato seems to be the first extant writer to view man as a puppet of the gods, and in his wake many authors have dubbed man an actor on the stage of the world. Since the metaphor was particularly dear to those beggar-philosophers, the Cynics, it is scarcely surprising that it also fascinates that contemporary creator of beggar-philosophers, Samuel Beckett. From variations on the old metaphor of theatrum mundi, where man the actor performs for an Eternal Spectator, Beckett creates a new semi-cynical drama.
In Beckett's first play, Eleuthéria (written 1947, but never produced...
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