BECKETT, PINTER, & 'THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

34 Pages·2010·0.89 MB·English

BECKETT, PINTER, & ‘THE
THEATRE OF THE ABSURD’:
BACKGROUND, INTRODUCTION
& CONTEXT

For Reading Comprehension
and Vocabulary

Dispensa per gli studenti del corso di
Letteratura Teatrale Inglese (Lettorato)

Dott. Ewan Glenton

FACOLTÀ DI LETTERE E FILOSOFIA
CONTENTS

1. THE VICTORIAN AGE 3
2. THE 20TH CENTURY 9
3. MODERNIST LITERATURE 12
4. EXISTENTIALISM 15
5. ALBERT CAMUS 17
6. JOHN OSBORNE’S LOOK BACK IN ANGER 20
7. SAMUEL BECKETT 24
8. HAROLD PINTER 28
2
1. THE VICTORIAN AGE

Victorian Morality
Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of people living at the time of Queen Victoria
(1837-1901) in particular, and to the moral climate of Great Britain throughout the 19th century in
general, that were in stark contrast to the morality of the previous Georgian period. It is not actually
specifically tied to this historical period and can describe any set of values that espouses sexual
repression, low tolerance of crime, and a strong social ethic. Due to the prominence of the British
Empire, many of these values were spread across the world.

Historians now regard the Victorian era as a time of many contradictions. A plethora of social
movements concerned with morals co-existed with a class system that imposed harsh living
conditions upon many. The apparent contradiction between the widespread cultivation of an
outward appearance of dignity and restraint and the prevalence of social phenomena that included
prostitution and child labour were two sides of the same coin: various social reform movements and
high principles arose from attempts to improve the harsh conditions.

Queen Victoria, Albert & Family (Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1846)

The term Victorian has acquired a range of connotations, including that of a particularly strict set of
moral standards, which are often applied hypocritically. This stems from the image of Queen
Victoria – and her husband, Prince Albert, perhaps even more so – as innocents, unaware of the
private habits of many of her respectable subjects; this particularly relates to their sex lives. This
image, however, is mistaken: Victoria’s attitude toward sexual morality was a consequence of her
knowledge of the corrosive effect of the loose morals of the aristocracy in earlier reigns upon the
public’s respect for the nobility and the Crown. The Prince Consort as a young child had
experienced the pain of his parents’ divorce after they were involved in public sexual scandals.
Young Albert’s mother had left his family home and she died shortly thereafter.

Two hundred years earlier, the Puritan republican movement, under the leadership of Oliver
Cromwell, had temporarily overthrown the British monarchy and, during England’s years as a
republic, the law imposed a strict moral code on the people (such as abolishing Christmas as too
indulgent of the sensual pleasures). When the monarchy was restored in 1660, a period of loose
living and debauchery appeared to be a reaction to the earlier repression. The two social forces of
Puritanism and libertinism continued to motivate Britain’s collective psyche from the Restoration
3
onward. This was particularly significant in the public perceptions of the Hanoverian monarchs who
immediately preceded Queen Victoria. For instance, her uncle George IV was commonly perceived
as a pleasure-seeking playboy, whose conduct in office was the cause of much scandal. By the time
of Victoria, the interplay between high cultured morals and low vulgarity was thoroughly embedded
in British culture.

Verbal or written communication of emotion or sexual feelings, for instance, was often proscribed
so people instead used the language of flowers. However they also wrote explicit erotica, perhaps
the most famous being the racy tell-all My Secret Life by the pseudonym Walter (allegedly Henry
Spencer Ashbee), and the magazine The Pearl, which was published for several years and reprinted
as a paperback book in the 1960s. Some current historians now believe that the myth of Victorian
repression can be traced back to early twentieth-century views, such as those of Lytton Strachey, a
member of the Bloomsbury Group, who wrote Eminent Victorians.

Oscar Wilde

Throughout the whole Victorian era, homosexuals were regarded as abominations and
homosexuality was illegal. Homosexual acts were a capital offence until 1861. However, many
famous men from the British Isles, such as Oscar Wilde, were notorious homosexuals. Toward the
end of the century, many large trials were held on the subject. In the same way, throughout the
Victorian Era, movements for justice, freedom, and other strong moral values opposed greed,
exploitation, and cynicism. The writings of Charles Dickens, in particular, observed and recorded
these conditions, while Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels carried out much of their analysis of
capitalism in – and as a reaction to – Victorian Britain.

Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org

*

All Change in the Victorian Age
It’s all there in popular fiction. From Jane Austen in the 1810s, via Charles Dickens’ pictures of mid
century London life, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895, the world of literature moved from
comedies of country manners to blistering portraits of urban poverty and, finally, time travel. Not
bad for 80-odd years.

Although the Industrial Revolution had already begun, Britain in 1800 had changed little in
centuries. It was a rural country, dominated by agriculture. For most, the world was restricted to
4
their village – where their family had probably lived for generations – and the nearest market town,
not surprising when the fastest thing on earth was a galloping horse, covering 100 miles a day at
best. If you lived in Somerset, London was almost foreign, much as it had been in 1600.

Horizons were limited and life was slow. It was horsepower or nothing, and daylight and the
seasons ruled the countryside. But all that was about to change. Although the steam engine was first
invented in 1769 by James Watt, for decades his monopoly had prevented significant development
and kept prices high. It was only in the nineteenth century that the real impact of steam would be
fully felt. And what an impact. Steam changed everything. It was faster, more powerful, and could
work independently of natural power sources, such as water. Traction engines saw fields ploughed
twenty times faster than before, and factories could be anywhere. They chose towns and cities. At a
time of massive population expansion in Britain (from 9 million in 1801 to 36 million in 1911),
cities were expanding even faster. Once islands in a sea of fields, needing the agricultural economy
to sustain them, they forged ahead as farm-workers made redundant by steam migrated to the
nearest town to find work. Manchester and Sheffield quadrupled between 1801 and 1851, Bradford
and Glasgow grew eightfold. Cities were the masters now.

With greater speed came a greater need for industries and businesses to make more and make it
quicker. Steam made this possible and changed working life forever. Gone were the days when
work was dictated by natural forces: steam engines were servant to neither season nor sunshine.
Factories had foremen and life became correspondingly more regimented. The clocking-on machine
was invented in 1885 and time and motion studies to increase efficiency would be introduced only
some twenty years later. But it was not all bad news. Agricultural incomes depended on variable
harvests and weather. Factories provided secure and predictable income, but long hours.

Working life was becoming increasingly regulated, and the working week was reorganised to
promote ever-greater efficiency. The old custom of St. Monday – when no work was done – was
gradually phased out and to compensate, work stopped around midday on Saturday and did not
resume until Monday morning. A new division between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ emerged, and this new
block of weekend leisure time coincided with the development of spectator sports like cricket and
football, and the rise of music hall entertainment for the new working classes. New loyalties were
needed to fill some of the vacuum caused by the demise of close-knit rural communities, and they
5
didn’t come from the church. Many of the middle class (itself a new term dating only from 1812)
became concerned about the godlessness of the working classes when it emerged that only 50 per
cent of the eligible population attended a church service on Census Sunday in 1851.

But if the Anglican Church was seen to be losing the working classes, Methodism, stressing hard
work and self-discipline, was increasingly popular. It fitted the ethos of the age. Commerce and
business brought a new spirit of self-help, popularised in the 1859 book of the same name by
Samuel Smiles, with the opening line, ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves’. The modern
world was opening up new opportunities for those who would work hard enough to take them. A
new breed of self-made man – never a woman – had emerged. Proud of their accomplishments,
these nineteenth century yuppies encapsulated the spirit of this cut-throat capitalism.

This spirit of competition extended even as far as science. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species
(1859) described the theory of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest. The nineteenth century
was a world of free markets, free trade and laissez-faire government, with all moves towards
paternalism – in areas such as public health and poor laws – fiercely resisted. It was every man for
himself.

Meanwhile, the countryside was attracting ever less interest. The Corn Laws spelled out the shifting
balance of power. Passed in 1815 to fix the price of corn and protect the interests of the
agriculturists that then dominated Parliament, they were repealed only three decades years later,
against bitter protest from landowners and loud applause from industrialists. Farmers were passé:
everything that was anything was urban. The comic stereotypes in the satirical magazine Punch –
caricaturing agricultural labourers as backward yokels in smocks and chewing straws – flourished
in the 1870s and live on to this day.

Adapted from: Bruce Robinson: All Change in the Victorian Age (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history)

*

The ‘Two Nations’ – the rich and the poor
The time is long past when ‘Victorian’ meant everything prudish, sentimental, and conventional.
Now that we know more about them, we can see that the surface of respectability the Victorians
presented was often only a protective convenience covering feelings and conduct not unlike our
own. Under it, many of them lived private lives as freely as bearded young rebels today.

The technological revolution the Victorians were born into was in its way as violently disruptive as
that of our atomic age. Application of the steam engine to machinery early in the 19th century had
drawn millions of people from rural cottages and hand looms to work in factories. Even more
sharply than ours, their world was divided between ‘the two nations’, the rich and the poor. The
aristocracy – the titled classes and the landed gentry – still lived in castles, halls, or manor houses
on rents from vast inherited estates, hunting, sitting as vestrymen and justices of the peace, going up
to London to vote for higher duties on imported corn and stiffer penalties against poachers. In the
towns, workers lived in unspeakable slums near the factories, and the owner in his spacious house
on the hill above, away from the smoke and filth and noise. Efforts to form unions or associations to
bargain with employers met with brutal opposition. Thousands of unemployed workers
6
demonstrated in the streets of the cities, while in the countryside starving farmhands set fire to
barns. Heavy-handed justice, which sentenced culprits to long terms of hard labour, transportation,
or even death, failed to end the violence.

The employers belonged to the great middle class that arose during the Industrial Revolution, when
England made itself the workshop of the world. The two traits that dominated the middle class are
the same ones for which the younger generation today repudiates its bourgeois background:
materialism and respectability. By the mid 19th century, the merchant or millowner’s success was
tangible evidence of his success in cut-throat competition for trade. And he had been too busy to
find time for much education; he left reading and artistic affairs to his wife, who, with equally
meagre intellectual development and plenty of servants, devoted herself to over-elaborate dress and
filled her house with tasteless bric-a-brac. Absorption in possessions and paucity of culture appear
in portraits of the middle class throughout the 19th century.

Respectability, the other middle-class characteristic, was not unrelated to materialism. The
Calvinism underlying the Puritan ethic regarded wealth as a visible sign of God’s approval, and to
acquire it and bequeath it to one’s children was the duty of an honest businessman. High moral
principles grounded in Protestant religion guaranteed the legitimacy of the children who would
inherit it. Since sanctity of property demanded sanctity of the marriage bond, commercial honesty
and marital fidelity went hand in hand – failure in either outlawed a man from respectable society.

Most of the contemporary thinkers and critics were themselves of middle-class origin: John Ruskin
(1819-1900) was the son of a wine merchant, while Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) was the grandson
of a customs collector and the son of a schoolmaster. An exception was Thomas Carlyle (1795-
1881), the son of peasants, who accused this new ‘Working Aristocracy’ of Mammonism,
exclaiming, in Past and Present:

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we
think [...] that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. “My starving workers?” answers the
rich Mill-owner: “Did I not hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the
sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?”

Hard Times (Sir Hubert von Herkomer, 1885)

In earlier times, when wages could not support a man and his family, they were given relief out of
the ‘poor rate’, a tax levied upon the landowners of the parish where they lived. If infirm from
sickness or old age, the poor were cared for by the parish in a hospital or poorhouse, probably one
7
surviving from monastic days or established long since by charitable bequest. But the mushroom
factory towns had no such means of dealing with poverty, unemployment or sickness. The New
Poor Law of 1834, in hope of discouraging idleness, gave help to the indigent only in the big new
workhouses built for groups of several parishes, into which men, women, children, the sick and
aged, lunatics and delinquents, were all thrown together.

Moreover, in 1830, no workers and few millowners sat in Parliament. More than two hundred seats
in the House of Commons were filled by the borough-owners without any election. Though it gave
the vote to only one out of six males, First Reform Bill was the opening wedge of democratic
government. Commissions were set up to determine what was needed, and the appalling conditions
revealed by their reports horrified even the Tory opposition. The huge sprawling towns spawned by
the Industrial Revolution were functioning under the same regulations as when they were villages of
one or two parishes. Children of six or seven were working in mills twelve hours a day, six days a
week, protected only by rules designed in Elizabethan times for apprentices living in a careful
master’s family. Another report described half-naked women working in some mines, young girls
crawling on all fours to draw trucks of coal or iron ore, children of five or six made to sit solitary in
the dark all day long, opening and shutting ventilating doors. Aghast at these revelations,
Parliament passed the first significant Factory Act in 1833, followed by the 1842 act forbidding the
employment of women in the mines or of boys under the age of ten. But, enforcement of these acts,
in either mill or mine, was far from adequate, and in other trades child labour was never treated
systematically. If, like Dickens’ Oliver Twist, they were farmed out to brutal masters, their lot
might be desperate.

Adapted from: Gordon S. Haight, ed.: The Portable Victorian Reader (Penguin, 1972).
8
2. THE 20TH CENTURY

The early arms race of the 20th century escalated into a war which involved many powerful nations:
World War I (1914-1918). This war drastically changed the way war was fought, as new inventions
such as machine guns, tanks, chemical weapons, and grenades created stalemates on the battlefield
and millions of troops were killed with little progress made on either side. After more than four
years of trench warfare in western Europe, and 20 million dead, those powers who had formed the
Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia, later replaced by the United States and joined by Italy)
emerged victorious over the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire).
In addition to annexing much of the colonial possessions of the vanquished states, the Triple
Entente exacted punitive restitution payments from their former foes, plunging Germany in
particular into economic depression. The Russian Empire was plunged into revolution during the
conflict and transitioned into the first ever communist state, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
empires were dismantled at the war’s conclusion. World War I brought about the end of the royal
and imperial ages of Europe and established the United States as a major world military power.

At the beginning of the period, Britain was arguably the world’s most powerful nation. However, its
economy was ruined by World War I, and its empire began to shrink, producing a growing power
vacuum in Europe. Fascism, a movement which grew out of post-war angst and was accelerated by
the Great Depression of the 1930s, gained momentum in Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1920s and
1930s, culminating in World War II (1939-1945), sparked by Nazi Germany's aggressive expansion
at the expense of its neighbours. Meanwhile, Japan had rapidly transformed itself into a
technologically-advanced industrial power. Its military expansion into eastern Asia and the Pacific
Ocean helped to bring the United States into World War II. Germany was defeated by the Soviet
Union in the east and by the D-Day invasion of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and
Free France from the west. The war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. Japan
later became a U.S. ally with a powerful economy based on consumer goods and trade. Germany
was divided between the western powers and the Soviet Union; all areas recaptured by the Soviet
Union (East Germany and eastward) were essentially transitioned into Soviet puppet states under
communist rule. Meanwhile, western Europe was influenced by the American Marshall Plan and
made a quick economic recovery, becoming major allies of the United States under capitalist
economies and relatively democratic governments.

World War II left about 60 million people dead. When the conflict ended in 1945, the United States
and the Soviet Union emerged as very powerful nations. Allies during the war, they soon became
hostile to one other as the competing ideologies of communism and capitalism occupied Europe,
divided by the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. The military alliances headed by these nations
(NATO in North America and western Europe; the Warsaw Pact in eastern Europe) were prepared
9
to wage total war with each other throughout the Cold War (1947-91). The period was marked by a
new arms race, and nuclear weapons were produced in the tens of thousands, sufficient to end most
life on the planet had they ever been used. This is believed by some historians to have staved off an
inevitable war between the two, as neither could win if their full nuclear arsenals were unleashed
upon each other. This was known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Although the Soviet
Union and the United States never directly entered conflict with each other, several proxy wars,
such as the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War (1957-1975), were waged to contain the
spread of communism.

After World War II, most of the European-colonized world in Africa and Asia gained independence
in a process of decolonization. This, and the drain of the two world wars, caused Europe to lose
much of its long-held power. Meanwhile, the wars empowered several nations, including the UK,
U.S., Russia, China and Japan, to exert a strong influence over many world affairs. American
culture spread around the world with the advent of Hollywood, Broadway, rock and roll, pop music,
fast food, big-box stores, and the hip-hop lifestyle. British culture continued to influence world
culture, including the ‘British Invasion’ into American music, leading many top rock bands (such as
Swedish ABBA) to sing in English. After the Soviet Union collapsed under internal pressure in
1991, a ripple effect led to the dismantling of communist states across eastern Europe and their
rocky transitions into market economies.

Following World War II, the United Nations was established as an international forum in which the
world’s nations could get together and discuss issues diplomatically. It has enacted laws on
conducting warfare, environmental protection, international sovereignty, and human rights, among
other things. Peacekeeping forces consisting of troops provided by various countries, in concert
with various United Nations and other aid agencies, has helped to relieve famine, disease, and
poverty, and to contain local wars and conflicts. Europe slowly united, politically and economically,
into what eventually became the European Union, which consisted of 15 European countries by the
end of the century.

In approximately the last third of the century, concern about humankind’s impact on the Earth’s
environment caused environmentalism to become a major citizen movement. In many countries,
especially in Europe, the movement was channelled into politics partly through Green parties,
though awareness of the problem permeated societies. By the end of the century, some progress had
been made in cleaning up the environment in first-world countries, though pollution continued
apace, and environmental problems in newly industrializing countries, such as India and China, had
10