Beckett’s Co-authors

Rewriting Waiting for Godot

S. E. Gontarski (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

296 Seiten

2025
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-3995-2933-4 (ISBN)

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Closely examines the original stagings of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the point at which theatrical collaboration becomes co-authorship.

Beckett’s Co-authors takes a fresh look at Samuel Beckett and the business of authorship, especially his involvement in the complicated machinery of commercial theatre. Focusing particularly on Beckett's first professionally produced play, Waiting for Godot, and its premieres in the US, UK and the Republic of Ireland, this book examines extra-authorial interventions into the creative process and how such interventions challenges the autonomy of the author and his artwork. Calling the result of these early collaborations ‘co-authorship’, S. E. Gontarski delves into the hybrid genre of theatre where collective aesthetics tends to override and thus supersede individual creation, using the methodology of archival archaeology to uncover previously unpublished letters and unknown archival documents relating to three national premieres. These case studies nevertheless have implications far beyond a single theatrical work, placing a spotlight on the nature of authorship and the process of realising dramatic texts in a monetised culture.

S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has published more than 40 books, including The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories and Translations (2012), The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014), Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (2015), Beckett Matters: Beckett’s Late Modernism (2016) and Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn (2018).

List of Figures
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Note on the Text

1. Overview: A Genealogy of Intervention
2. The Broadway Adepts, or Wilderizing Beckett
3. Godot’s Bad Blood: The Tumult in Miami
4. Cutting up Godot
5. Mimeography: Godot and the Uncertainties of Textual Transmission
6. ‘Cerebral physiology’: Degeneration and the Irrelevance of Godot
7. The Case for Multiple Authorship

Appendix A. Waiting for Godot. Theatre Arts. XL.8 (August 1956): 36-61 (collation)
Appendix B. Peter Snow’s Autograph Revisions Collated with the Grove Press edition
Appendix C. Donald Albery’s memo to the Lord Chamberlain, 26 April 1954
Appendix D. Known Mimeographed Versions of Waiting for Godot

Relevant Archives
References
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	21.05.2025
Reihe/Serie	Other Becketts
Zusatzinfo	57 black & white illustrations
Verlagsort	Edinburgh
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Dramatik / Theater
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-3995-2933-1 / 1399529331
ISBN-13	978-1-3995-2933-4 / 9781399529334
Zustand	Neuware