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2 results

Bad Godots

Bad Godots
  • ‘Vladimir Emerges from the Barrel' and Other Interventions
  • S. E. Gontarski
  • Published online:
    26 January 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • This Element focuses on the machinery of commercial theatre, on extra-authorial interventions into the creative process and on the people and institutional forces that foster them. Such a process challenges the autonomy of the artwork and authorial integrity. The primary focus of this Element is then on the hybrid genre of theatre where collective esthetics tends to override and so to supersede individual creation. The essay pays special attention to Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play, Waiting for Godot, primarily its English language premieres in the US, UK, and the Republic of Ireland. Its implications, however, reach far beyond the genetic and production histories of a single theatrical work to deal with the nature of authorship in a monetized culture, the process of realizing dramatic texts in such a culture, and Samuel Beckett's engagement with such machinery of art.

  • Chapter 5 - Theodore Hook’s Sayings and Doings on the Page and the Stage

  • Angela Esterhammer, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Print and Performance in the 1820s
    Published online:
    11 March 2020
    Print publication:
    20 February 2020, pp 112-142

  • Summary

    Journalist, playwright, novelist, and English improvvisatore, Theodore Hook tapped into readers’ interest in representations of fashionable life with his Sayings and Doings (1824–8). Hook’s stories – influenced by his political journalism and theatrical experience and sometimes adapted for the stage – engage fundamental questions about speech, action, and personal identity. They constitute a hybrid genre of sociological documentary and imaginative fiction by an observer who stands both inside and outside the world he depicts. While William Hazlitt popularized the term “silver–fork fiction” in his reviews of Hook, the tendency to assimilate Sayings and Doings to later, longer silver–fork novels has obscured what is innovative about Hook’s fictional debut and how it embodies the distinctive climate of the 1820s. Sayings and Doings is an experimental hybrid of fiction, social critique, and metafiction that combines techniques of representation from theatre, improvisational performance, and newspaper journalism.