Introduction

Beckett’s characters are not drawn from the Gaelic-speaking peasants of Aran, but he is very much in tune with Synge and often echoes him. The dangerous closeness to unconscious self-parody in Synge’s idiom was something Beckett could use, although it may have taken him some time to see just how: a knowing self-parody becomes a major means of expressing self-consciousness in his fiction and his drama. Beckett’s exceptionally sensitive ear, which has enabled him to play such complex variations on the Synge speech tunes, must also have made for difficulties in his first grapplings as a writer with Anglo-Irish English. Beckett’s isolated incursions into film and television draw out a note of dissent from the general view of his masterful versatility.