ABSTRACT
In the popular imagination Samuel Beckett conjures up tramps, dustbins and prolonged inactivity. To the commentators — and seldom can a writer within twenty years of his first success have given rise to such a formidable heap of interpretation — he is the occasion, like the forest of Arden to the banished Duke in As You Like It, for ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones’. The irony inherent in this double view of him must have given Beckett — more of a lover of the joke for its own sake than perhaps either the popular or the academic party will allow much quiet pleasure. All the same, the two views, that there is nothing to Beckett beyond dustbins and that there is everything conceivable beyond dustbins, quite clearly suggest, taken together, the nature of his dramatic method. What I hope to show here is that the Beckettian demonstration is a thoroughly dramatic one; that, in other words, though he set out as poet and novelist and was quoted quite recently as seeing himself as a novelist who also writes plays, the point at which his public found him and he found his public was the right one. Samuel Beckett was waiting for the theatre as the theatre was waiting for Samuel Beckett.
