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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
Abstract
This article traces the Italian influences in Beckett's radio plays, beginning with Dante's Divine Comedy and its intertextual significance for All That Fall, Embers and Rough for Radio II in particular. In the next step, these texts are further analysed, together with Words and Music, against the historical backdrop of the Second World War, when radio broadcasting contributed significantly to the rise of Fascism in Europe. Finally, I will read Cascando through a biographical lens, in light of Beckett's 1959 trip to Sorrento, where he attended the Italia Prize awards ceremony accompanied by BBC producer Donald McWhinnie. In doing so, on the one hand, the chapter shows how Beckett used Dante to gradually develop a generic radiophonic space that is marked by a lack of sight and dissociated from any specific geography or nationality. On the other hand, it illustrates how this seeming universality is, at the same time, infused with different cultural contexts that merge almost beyond the point of recognizability. These frameworks are not limited to Ireland, which permeates the early radio plays especially, or France, Beckett's permanent home that put him at further remove from his native country in linguistic terms. Germany, which he visited throughout his career, and by extension Italy, where he spent the least time, should not be neglected as crucial in-between spaces that help to navigate the seeming no man's land of Beckett's later radio plays.
Keywords: Broadcasting; radio drama; Italia Prize (Prix Italia); Dante; Fascism
The influence of Italian culture on Beckett's writing has typically been considered from the following angles: his formal study of the language and its literature at Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927, the private lessons he started taking with Bianca Esposito in 1926, his trip to Florence during the summer of 1927 and his lifelong engagement with the Divine Comedy. This chapter seeks to expand that focus by concentrating on Beckett's radio plays, beginning with Dante and his intertextual significance for All That Fall, Embers and Rough for Radio II. In the next step, I will dwell some more on the latter two, expanded with Words and Music, to situate these works in the historical context of the Second World War, when broadcasting contributed to the spread of Fascism in Europe.
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