This chapter considers the conceptual function of the echo as a metaphor for processes of intertextual dialogue and transformation. When thinking about the character that Shakespeare’s texts assume in Beckett’s works, instead of terms like adaptation, quotation or association, it is the notion of echo that aptly describes Beckett’s ways of engaging with his predecessor and materializing this engagement in the theatrical performance. This chapter regards the echo both as a principle of composition and an immanent figuration that is realized in the theatrical performance. Matter and materiality, stones and bones in Beckett’s works very often become a metonymy for the text itself in that they expose its opacity and resistance, and, at the same time, render it immortal as a kind of petrified lacuna. The chapter considers Beckett’s use of the materiality of stones and bones and reads Happy Days with Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline and Hamlet.

A final chapter analyses the idea of sleep and closure in The Tempest, Waiting for Godot, The Winter’s Tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Cascando, Nacht und Träume, Footfalls and Rockaby. The rhythm of sleeping and waking pervades the diurnal structure of Waiting for Godot, and many of Beckett’s characters sleep waking or wake sleeping. Likewise, the chapter addresses the many ways in which Shakespeare’s œuvre stages sleep. Staged sleep introduces a further level to the theatrical experience of seeing and being seen, of active and passive characters. In Shakespeare’s and in Beckett’s plays sleep can be read as a liminal state, in which the bodily presence simultaneously refers to a mental absence. Sleep, the chapter argues, becomes a productive meta-dramatic state, in which the theatre foregrounds the boundary between reality and illusion that affects the relation between the actor and the audience.

This chapter discusses how literary heritage and authorial legacies are addressed, reflected on and performed in reconfigurations of Shakespeare. It reads the encounter of Beckett’s aesthetics with Shakespeare by way of Joyce’s use of language and his performative reworking of literary heritage. Interacting with Joyce, Beckett also found an early model of how to engage with literary history in a way that is both creative and destructive. The chapter focuses on the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, which inquires into notions of authorship, national heritage and identity. With regard to Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, the chapter records various received paradigms of literary lineage and reception. The second part of this chapter traces Beckett’s inversions of Joycean and Shakespearean paradigms. Shakespeare becomes part of the creative matrix of Beckett’s works where the very richness of his material emerges in his use of minute details and his attention to the mole-cular level of languages and ideas that form the minimal components of his work.

Outlining the historical scope of the book, this chapter discusses Shakespeare’s and Beckett’s works in periods that were conceived of as inherently transformational. The chapter will address the early links between Shakespeare and Beckett that were established in British theatre history. The second part of this chapter will read the scenes on Dover cliff in Act IV of King Lear as a metaphor for the theatre in which both Beckett and Shakespeare explore the edges of their very medium. This latter part examines Beckett’s ‘variations on rise and fall’ in many of his plays, such as All that Fall, Rough for Theatre and Waiting for Godot – which, in dialogue with King Lear, dramatize the experience of blindness, crawling and falling.

In 1922, a year that saw the publication of landmark works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the sixth-form student Samuel Beckett read plays by William Shakespeare. His copies of editions of Shakespeare’s plays like the one of Macbeth1 contain many underlined or marked passages, but the reading trace very often found in their margins is: ‘Learn by heart’.2

Liminal spaces of waiting and expectation are at the centre of this chapter that focuses on Hamlet, Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’. The chapter draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s study Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and on Daniela Caselli’s Beckett’s Dantes (2005), but it also takes the idea of purgatory to describe a dynamic, permeable space for intertextual dialogue. I argue that the texts of Beckett, Dante and Shakespeare do not appear as stable entities but rather are in flux and resonate with one another. Beckett’s recourse to purgatory is therefore not only the adaptation of a space for the imagination of medieval readers, but also a means of reflecting on the processes in which literary space is constructed. A main part of the chapter is devoted to the reading of ‘Dante and the Lobster‘ in dialogue with Hamlet and King Lear and also with the poetry of Thomas MacGreevy, from which many of its themes derive. ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and Hamlet converge on the notion of pause, and the chapter examines the ways in which both works become mutually interanimating in their reflections on dualisms, between human being and animal, Christ and the lobster, beginning and end, hesitation and rashness, fear and the embrace of death.

This chapter considers the reciprocal productivity between Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s romance The Tempest. It examines the settings of the two plays, their dialectics of making and unmaking, their dynamics of confinement and release, the materiality of air and earth, and the notion of ending. It looks at the insular dominions of Prospero’s island and the space inhabited by Beckett’s characters in Endgame, and argues that the imperfections and shortcomings of a medium are not an end in themselves but become the grounds on which plays such as The Tempest and Endgame transcend the finitude of their art and reflect back on it, asserting its very finitude as a condition of possibility.In both plays, the game of chess figures as a structural and thematic component and reflects on the art of the playwright. The chapter analyses the brief scene in which Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. The scene functions as a mise-en-abîme, as a play-within-the-play, and becomes a metaphor for the play itself. In the many references to chess in Beckett’s works, above all in Endgame, chess, as this chapter argues, presents a matrix of multiplicity that remains tied to form.

Beckett’s works are built around the paradoxical notion of the still life. Suspended between motion and standstill, destruction and creation, a still life conveys the state of a being that is simultaneously lifeless and alive. Still lifes are located at the intersection of life and death, of presence and absence, of the material and the immaterial dimension of a work of art. Beckett, above all in his later prose and drama, uses the still life as a reflection on the creation of a work of art while simultaneously performing this creative process as it were in vivo. This chapter discusses the relation between visual, textual, musical and dramatic still lifes. It analyses the tableaux vivants and nature mortes in works such as A Piece of Monologue, Stirrings Still and What Where in relation to Hamlet, and investigates the notion of ghostly doppelgangers by way of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise that informed Beckett’s late plays. Journeys of dispossession and shrinking, moments frozen in time that approach the condition of a still life will be analysed in Timon of Athens, The End, King Lear, Texts for Nothing, Sonnets 55, 18 and 81, and finally in Breath.

Restlessness is a resistance to finality. Shakespeare and Beckett were restless writers. ‘Parfois tu sais, […] c’est pire de ne pas écrire que d’écrire’,1 Beckett told Raymond Federman in one of their last conversations. The necessity to write that is accompanied by a profound scepticism about the success story of an enlightened, humanist modernity is a stance shared by both Beckett and Shakespeare. Written on the edges of modernity, their works create and reflect on the very thresholds they represent. They articulate a restlessness between representation and what happens when representation becomes impossible.