A Creamy Work: Schiller and Beckett

• Autores: Arthur Rose
• Localización: Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett / Laurens De Vos (ed. lit.), Mariko Hori Tanaka (ed. lit.), Nicholas E. Johnson (ed. lit.), 2021, ISBN 978-90-04-46839-9, págs. 175-190
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter considers the aesthetic judgement implied in three reflections on the German playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller attributed to Samuel Beckett from, variously, 1937, 1961, and 1985. Rather than test the veracity of their attribution, which has been the subject to some debate in Beckett studies, it suggests they might provide a starting point for a more speculative discussion about aesthetic principles expressed by Schiller and Beckett, and how these principles might be brought into a creative, ‘proximate’ alignment. Drawing on Beckett’s critical engagement with Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1800) in his German Diary (1936–7), the chapter offers a reading of Beckett’s critical assessment of Schiller’s drama that, it will transpire, accords with Schiller’s own aesthetic theory. This synthetic aesthetic effort will provide a useful structure for approaching Beckett’s late drama. By reading Schiller via Beckett and, reciprocally, Beckett via Schiller, the chapter offers a polyphonous response to ‘all the dead voices’ offered by, and in dialogue with, these playwrights. Moreover, it replicates this response in its methodology, by using only the quoted accounts of another scholar to render references by Beckett to Schiller necessarily speculative.