Chapter 3 - ‘What a man is’: Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, The Haitian Trilogy and Franklin

Summary

From his earliest efforts as a dramatist, Walcott has undertaken a variety of forms, styles and subject-matter, these variations to some extent manifesting themselves simultaneously. There is, therefore, inevitably, a degree of expediency and arbitrariness in any attempt to impose a schema of stages or periods on Walcott's dramatic corpus. This is compounded by the fact that it is sometimes not easy to decide where to position a play chronologically, because of the long period that may have elapsed between the first and final versions. The principle by which the plays are grouped for discussion in the present study is one that is broadly chronological, but one in which considerations of theme and form modify a strict linear chronology. This factor is further highlighted by the occasional wide gap between the time of a play's composition or first production and the time of its being published, or published in a collection of plays by Walcott.

The plays that perhaps suggest themselves most readily as constituting an integrated group are the four in Walcott's first published collection, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. This group, consisting of plays set in St Lucia, is instructively extended and ‘framed’ by the plays that deal with the Haitian Revolution, in particular Henri Christophe, which pre-dates the plays in Dream, and the later The Haitian Earth, collected, along with Henri Christophe and Drums and Colours, in The Haitian Trilogy (2002).