4 - Counterpoint and Hysteria
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
Summary
nell. One mustn't laugh at these things, Nagg.
Why must you always laugh at them?
nagg. Not so loud!
nell. Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But—
samuel beckett, EndgameELIOT'S ‘DOUBLENESS’
In spite of his early censures in his essay on ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’ against mixing realistic and abstract conventions, T. S. Eliot made the following arresting statement at the conclusion of his book The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism:
I once designed, and drafted a couple of scenes of, a verse play. My intention was to have one character whose sensibility and intelligence should be on the plane of the most sensitive and intelligent members of the audience; his speeches should be addressed to them as much as to the other personages in the play—or rather, should be addressed to the latter, who were to be material, literal-minded and visionless, with the consciousness of being overheard by the former. There was to be an understanding between this protagonist and a small number of the audience, while the rest of the audience would share the responses of the other characters in the play.
This implied division of characters and spectators into the two groups of the sensitive and the insensitive has run through much of Eliot's drama, and has often lent an ironic and satirical force to his playwriting which is characteristic of the modern theatre.
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- The Dark Comedy , pp. 158 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1968