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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
The values of a community are revealed in its tragedies, and it is increasingly clear that the classical form of tragedy has been unable to accommodate modern values. It is too aristocratic for a democratic age. Sometimes it has been felt that we no longer merit a hero, and sometimes that heroes are now very dangerous and delusive. This latter view was articulated eloquently by the German philosopher-theologian, Karl Jaspers, in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism:
Tragedy becomes the privilege of the exalted few – all others must be content to be wiped out indifferently in disaster. Tragedy then becomes a characteristic not of man, but of a human aristocracy. As the code of privilege, this philosophy becomes arrogant and unloving; it gives us comfort by pandering to our self-esteem.
1. Jaspers, Karl, Tragedy is Not Enough, translated by Reiche, Harald A. T., Moore, Harry T. and Deutsch, Karl W. (London, Victor Gollancz, 1953), 99.Google Scholar
2. Donoghue, Denis, ‘Synge: Riders to the Sea: A Study’, (Irish) University Review, I, Summer, 1955, 58.Google Scholar
3. For example, Finney, Gail ‘The One-Act Tragedy at the Turn of the Century’, Modern Drama, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, 09, 1985, 451–61, esp. 452–3, 457.Google Scholar
4. Benson, Eugene, J. M. Sygne (London, Macmillan, Macmillan Modern Dramatists, 1982), 63–4.Google Scholar
5. An influential book which was published in Dublin in 1920 was Alice Stopford Green, The making of Ireland and Its Undoing, and this has many instances of the valuing of literature by the ferocious fighting Irishmen of the middle ages. There is the story, for instance, of ‘O'Doherty the son of O'Donnell's chief poet … taken prisoner by the O'Conors of Sligo, and a ransom given for him of the two best manuscripts in Donegal – the “Book of Princely Institutions” “to preserve manners, morals, and government in the kingdom” … and “the Book of the Kings” written at Clonmacnois …’ in about 1345.
6. Letter to Robinson, Lennox, 17 11, 1922.Google ScholarThe Letters of Sean O'Casey 1910–41, Vol. I, ed. Krause, David (London, Cassell, 1975), 105.Google Scholar
7. Fallon, Gabriel, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 17Google Scholar: He had been telling me for some time about a play he had mapped out, a play which would deal with the tragedy of a crippled I.R.A. man, one Johnny Boyle. He mentioned this play many times and always it was the tragedy of Johnny. I cannot recall that he once spoke of Juno or Joxer or the Captain; always Johnny.
8. Review of Windfalls by Sean O'Casey, reprinted in Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London. John Calder, 1983), 82.Google Scholar
9. Beckett himself converted Laurel and Hardy into a ‘hardy laurel’.
10. Burns, , ‘Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge’, stanza 7:Google Scholar
Many and sharp the num'rous ills
In woven with our frame;
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heaven-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
11. Thomson, Leslie, ‘Opening the Eyes of the Audience: Visual and Verbal Imagery in Juno and the Paycock’, Modern Drama, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, 12 1985, 565.Google Scholar
12. Lady Gregory's Journals, Volume One, Books One to Twenty-Nine, 10 October 1916–24 February 1925, edited by Daniel J. Murphy (Garrard's Cross, Colin Smythe, 1978).
Her initial reaction to the play can be seen from the following entry:
512 [5 March, 1924]
But that full house, the packed pit and gallery, the fine play, the call of the mother for the putting away of hatred – ‘give us Thine own eternal love!’ made me say to Yeats ‘This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes me glad to have been born.’
Her whispered conversation was thus recorded:
513 [9 March, 1924]
When the mother whose son has been killed – ‘Leader of an ambush where my neighbour's Free State soldier son was killed’ cries out ‘Mother of Jesus put away from us this murderous hatred and give us thine own eternal love’ I whispered to Casey ‘that is the prayer we must all use, it is the only thing that will save us, the teaching of Christ’. He said ‘Of humanity’. But what would that be without the Divine Atom?
13. Thomson, , loc. cit., 562.Google Scholar
14. Othello III. 3. 92:Google Scholar
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.
15. Letter to ProfessorKnowlson, James, 17 12, 1970Google Scholar, quoted in Worth, Katherine, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London, The Athlone Press, 1974), 242.Google Scholar
16. See 8 above.
17. op. cit., 83.
18. E.g. Cohn, Ruby, ‘The Plays of Yeats Through Beckett Coloured-Glasses’, The Threshold, Vol. 19, 1965, 41–7Google Scholar; Parkin, Andrew, ‘“… scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine…”: Similarities in the Plays of Yeats and Beckett’, Ariel, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1970, 44–58.Google Scholar
19. The bare space or simple set with the tree of Waiting for Godot recalling the symbolic tree of Purgatory, and with a suggestion that there is a Yeatsian origin for Lucky's dance as a kind of parody of Noh dancing:
Kenner, Hugh, Samuel Beckett (London, John Calder, 1962), 137Google Scholar (esp. footnote); Cohn, , op. cit., 44Google Scholar (‘In presentations I have seen, Lucky's dance of Godot resembles the dance of the lame beggar in The Cat and the Moon’); Parkin, , op. cit., 50.Google Scholar
20. Cohn, , op. cit., 45–6Google Scholar; Parkin, , op. cit., 51–2.Google Scholar
21. Cohn, , op. cit., 44.Google Scholar
22. Parkin, , op. cit., 55–7.Google Scholar
23. Parkin, Andrew, ‘Singular Voices: Monologue and Monodrama in the Plays of W. B. Yeats’, Modern Drama, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 06 1975, 149.Google Scholar
24. ‘The Tragic Theatre’ in Yeats, W. B., Essays and Introductions (London, Macmillan, 1961), 239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25. ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, stanza V:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, or life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
An cometh from afar:
26. Fehsenfeld, Martha D., ‘“Everything Out but the Faces”: Beckett's Reshaping of What Where for Television’, Modern Drama, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, 06 1986, 230.Google Scholar
She is quoting ‘a statement made by Samuel Beckett in conversation with the author in June 1978’.
27. Fehsenfeld, , loc. cit., 239.Google Scholar
28. Ibid., 234.
29. A Piece of Monologue in Collected Shorter Plays (London, Faber and Faber, 1984), 265.Google Scholar
30. Irish Times, 30 03, 1960Google Scholar, quoted in Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography ((1978), London, Picador 1980), 437.Google Scholar
31. In the programme for the ‘Shaw Centenary’, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, 1956. Quoted in Worth, Katherine, op. cit., 242.Google Scholar