[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 or published) a man of letters, Henri Krap, closes Act I and his life with the appropriate line, “Rideau.” Various characters refer to the play in which they play; a spectator jumps on-stage to criticize and interfere with the action; a glazier, summoned to fix a broken window, acts like a director during a rehearsal, and there is even a pirandellesque allusion to the author, named Beckett, pronounced Bequet.

In Waiting for Godot, although there is no mention of Beckett as author, there are subtle indications that the play is a play:

VLADIMIR:
Charming evening we're having.
ESTRAGON:
Unforgettable.
VLADIMIR:
And it's not over.
ESTRAGON:
Apparently not.
VLADIMIR:
It's only beginning.
ESTRAGON:
It's awful.
VLADIMIR:
Worse than the pantomime.
ESTRAGON:
The circus.
VLADIMIR:
The music-hall.
ESTRAGON:
The circus.

Vladimir comments acidly, “This is becoming really insignificant,” and Estragon, “Inspiring prospects.” Estragon directs Vladimir to an unnamed lavatory: “End of the corridor, on the left,” and Vladimir requests, “Keep my seat.” When Estragon seeks to escape backstage, Vladimir cries out, “Imbecile! There's no way out there.” Blind Pozzo of Act II asks if they are on the Board.

All the characters are performing artists; even the long day “is very near the end of its repertory.” In spite of his burdens, Lucky's job is not to carry, but to play the buffoon; he is a spectacle for Estragon and Vladimir; he dances and thinks at Pozzo's command. Pozzo in turn is most anxious for audience acclaim; he sprays his throat before speaking: “Is everybody looking at me? … Is everybody listening? … I don't like talking in a vacuum.” After his discourse on twilight, he asks Vladimir and Estragon, “How did you find me? Good? Fair? Middling? Poor? Positively bad?” And he confesses the obvious, “I have such need of encouragement.”

Vladimir and Estragon play at exercises, questions, contradictions, insults; they play at being Pozzo and Lucky. Perhaps because he has been a poet, Estragon is eager to tell Vladimir his dreams. Although Vladimir refuses to listen to Estragon's dreams, he insists upon narrating the story of the two thieves according to St. Luke. He sings a ballad to open Act II; he “minces like a mannequin” while wearing Lucky's hat. After blind Pozzo's outburst, Vladimir unconsciously echoes and expands upon his phrases that summarize one metaphysical meaning of the “tragicomedy”: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps.” Then, looking at the sleeping Estragon, Vladimir gives voice to an awareness of his dual role as actor and spectator: “At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” Intentionally, Beckett gives us no hint as to whether “someone” is God, Godot, or a creation of Vladimir's imagination.

Of all Beckett's dramas, Endgame is unique in its relentless focus upon the play as play. Named in terms of chess, called a “play” in Beckett's English translation, Endgame emphasizes its own gratuity. There are formal tableaux at the beginning and end. The painting hangs face to the wall. Although Beckett's scenic directions do not indicate the rise and fall of a curtain, Clov draws the curtains of the windows that look out upon what is left of the world. During the play, there are references to comedy, tragedy, farce. Early in the play, Hamm despairs, “The thing is impossible”; then he encourages himself (as he does periodically) with “We're getting on.” Soon, he admits, “This is slow work” and “This is not much fun.” After Hamm's comment, “This is deadly,” Clov enters to announce contradictorily, “Things are livening up.”

More explicit are the terms of dramatic technique. When Hamm declares that Clov will never leave him, Clov asks, “What is there to keep me here?” Hamm retorts, “The dialogue.” Hamm informs Clov that he is uttering an “aside,” then that he is “warming up for [his] last soliloquy.” When Clov sights a small boy, Hamm hopes that it is “not an underplot.” In leaving Hamm, Clov explains, “This is what we call making an exit.” When, at the end of the endgame, Hamm throws his whistle towards the spectators, he comments, like an appreciative spectator, “With my compliments.” Finally, Hamm sighs, “Since that's the way we're playing it, let's play it that way, and speak no more about it, speak no more.”

Less flamboyant actors than the characters of Godot, at least the male members of Endgame are performers. Clov has a passion for attaining order, and Nagg is a raconteur who remembers nostalgically that Nell used to laugh at his jokes. Hamm is the ham-actor implied by his name: he clears his throat before speaking; blind, he meticulously wipes his glasses; paralyzed from the waist down, he is lavish of gesture. Like Vladimir in Godot, he envisions the spectator who may be watching his performance: “Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. (Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they're at!”

The “someone” of Godot has become the “rational being” of Endgame; resonances of divinity have thumped down to earth. And on this earth, Hamm is not only an actor, but seems to be the director. However, rather than creation, he has been engaged in destruction of the world outside his shelter: “Outside of here it's death.” The shelter has replaced the world. Hamm orders Clov to push his wheel-chair along the walls of the shelter, “Right round the world!” Then, tiring of his travels, he wishes to be placed “bang in the center.”

In translating Fin de partie to Endgame, Beckett deliberately underlines Hamm's role as director-creator. When Nell does not answer her husband's knock on her ash-bin, and Nagg sinks down into his own ash-bin, their son Hamm summarizes the situation, “Finie la rigolade.” The English “Our revels now are ended” recalls the similarities between The Tempest and Endgame. In both plays, the central role is played by the director of the action of the play. Prospero is a deposed duke; Hamm refers to his kingdom, sits on a wheelchair-throne, and wears a toque-crown. Both Prospero and Hamm direct a play within the play, and Prospero's “Our revels now are ended” refers to a masque. Shakespeare still uses the “like” of a simile to compare inner and outer action:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

Hamm's “revels” refer to the major action of Endgame; outside the shelter “the insubstantial pageant” has already left “not a rack behind.” But in the shelter, Hamm composes his chronicle as Prospero directed his masque. Ironically, Hamm sets his chronicle on Christmas Eve, that time of birth rather than death, of peace and good will, rather than destruction and hatred. Hamm is lord of a lifeless world and sole custodian of its dwindling supplies, and Hamm's narrator-protagonist rules a similar domain. The father of a starving child crawls before him, begging for food. With charity towards none, but cruelly recalling a divine charity towards a people in exile, Hamm's “I” screams at the grovelling father, “But what in God's name do you imagine? … That there's manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you?”

Having bribed his father to listen to his chronicle, Hamm repeats it to Clov, who finds it funny. Clov—variously designated as Hamm's dog, menial, creature, and son—ruminates that the little boy would have grown up, and Hamm replies, “Very likely.”

Towards the end of Endgame, when Clov says that he sees a little boy through the window, Hamm dismisses Clov, “I don't need you any more.” Hamm, the performer, recites a line of Baudelaire; Hamm, the author, reviews the situation of the father in his story. In the final tableau, blind Hamm thinks he has been abandoned by Clov, but Clov is still on-stage, dressed preposterously for all weathers. Will Clov leave the shelter to fetch the little boy who may replace him as Hamm's servant, while Clov goes out to die in a desolate world? Or will Clov, leaving Hamm to die untended, fetch the little boy to be for him a dog, a menial, a creature, and a son? Is there a little boy at all? Was there ever?

In Beckett's work, there comes to be no way of distinguishing fact from fiction, play from plea. The attitude of the begging father is shared by the toy dog that Clov makes for Hamm. The implication of Hamm and Clov that the end of the world has come, is made explicit in Hamm's reminiscence of “a madman who thought the end of the world had come.” Perhaps Hamm invented the madman; perhaps he describes himself. Perhaps Clov invented the small boy in the window, even as Clov may have been the small boy in Hamm's invented chronicle. As the focus of Endgame narrows to the Hamm-Clov anguish, the tension is tautened between master and servant until, after the end of the play, one is perhaps eclipsed by the other, and the whole farcical, heart-breaking play begins again—perhaps.

Although no other Beckett play offers so elaborate a version of the metaphor of theatrum mundi, two other character-creators appear in his drama, and their creations function to blur the line between appearance and reality. In the radio drama Embers, the protagonist Henry invents stories, “stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it.” Henry, seeking respite from the merciless sound of the sea, composes hesitantly, contradicting himself: “shutters … no, hangings,” “the light, no light,” “sitting there in the … no, standing.” Describing Bolton as “an old man in great trouble,” Henry summons “Holloway with his little black bag.” Their conversation is summarized in the words of Bolt-on to Hollow-way (my hyphens), “Please! PLEASE!”

Lapsing into memories of father, wife, daughter, Henry reveals himself as an old man in great trouble. His memories forsake him, reducing him to stories, Bolton looking Holloway in the eye, “the old blue eye, very glassy, lids worn thin, lashes gone, whole thing swimming … Tears? (Pause. Long laugh.)” At the last, even the stories dissolve into the impersonal sea, “audible throughout,” drowning man's troubles with his dreams.

In Beckett's most recent play, Happy Days, memories and stories are scarcely separate in Winnie's mind. Both float up, or down, to Winnie, buried in a parched earth, in Act I up to her waist, in Act II up to her neck. Like Hamm in the center of his shelter, Winnie is “in exact centre of mound,” from which she engages in and directs the minimal action—the few words and movements of her husband, Willie, and the examination of the objects of her bag. Aside from the “trompe l'oeil backdrop,” there are no references in Happy Days to the play as play, but Winnie is acutely aware—more so than any other Beckett character—of her dual role as actor and spectator.

As performer, Winnie of Act I is punctilious about prayer and song, and although she abandons prayer by Act II, she actually closes the play with a song (the Merry Widow waltz). In order to pass the interminable wait for the bell that will end her happy day, Winnie recites fragments of the great poems of the English language. She busies herself with the details of her appearance as if she were about to make an entrance before an audience—brushing her teeth, filing her nails, combing her hair, fixing her hat, applying lipstick. Her husband, Willie, is the audience that protects her from the solitude she calls her “wilderness.” But beyond Wille, she is aware, like Vladimir, like Hamm, of eyes upon her: “Strange feeling that someone is looking at me.” Shortly afterwards she attaches a name to “someone.” Perhaps he is called Shower in the “expanse of scorched grass,” perhaps Cooker in the “blaze of hellish light.” Mr. Shower or Cooker, a compassionate or sadistic spectator, asks his lady companion crisp, colloquial questions about Winnie's condition, in the scene invented by Winnie. Like Hamm's “rational being,” he wants to know what Winnie means: “What's the idea? he says—stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground—coarse fellow—What does it mean? he says—What's it meant to mean?” And of course, we, the real spectators, echo the questions of Hamm's rational being, of Mr. Cooker or Shower.

In Act II, seemingly deserted by Willie, reduced to moving her facial muscles and vocal chords, Winnie creates again: “There is my story of course, when all else fails.” A girl named Mildred soon becomes Milly, rhyming with Willie; her Dolly (a slant-rhyme with Willie) has a “white straw hat” like Willie's, and “china blue eyes” like his. Millie wears a “pearl necklet” as Winnie did in Act I. Milly, like Willie, crawls “backward on all fours.” Abruptly, Winnie leaves Milly to wonder whether Willie has crawled head first into his hole, so that he is stuck there. She calls to him, but, receiving no answer, turns to “Mr. Shower—or Cooker … No longer young, not yet old.” Although Winnie is now buried up to her neck, Mr. Shower or Cooker comments on her bosom, asks pointed questions about her legs. Suddenly, Mr. Shower or Cooker and his lady companion quarrel violently—“Drop dead!”—and Winnie watches them recede in her mind's eye: “Last human kind—to stray this way.”

When Willie still fails to answer Winnie, she resorts to Milly, whom she frightens with a mouse, so that Winnie screams with Milly's terror. After sketchy reminiscences, Winnie prepares to sing to end her happy day, but Willie crawls into view, a spectacle in “top hat, morning coat, striped trousers, etc., white gloves in hand.” It is ambiguous as to whether Willie wishes to kiss or kill Winnie. But mutually and explicitly, Winnie and Willie “look at each other,” each of them actor and spectator, each testifying to the reality of the other—if only momentarily.

For this, perhaps, is what they are meant to mean. Man the actor no longer believes in the play; only a spectator can force the show to dodder on. And to this end, says Beckett, the actor may have to invent his audience.