Bond’s play depends upon many of the essential elements of tragedy as outlined by Aristotle: the ‘Reversal of Fortune’ (at the beginning of the play Lear is a king ordering the building of the wall; at the end he is with the peasants trying to tear it down), ‘Recognition… a change from ignorance to knowledge’ (‘I knew nothing, saw nothing, learnt nothing’ (p.74) Lear realises, while his blindness, like Oedipus’, gives him insight), the ‘Scene of Suffering’ (too numerous to mention in what remains one of the most violent plays ever written). So as tragedy, Lear displays elements from both Aristotelian and Shakespearean models: it traces the fall of a man from an eminent position (peripeteia), involves the hero’s discovery or recognition of his error through suffering (anagnorisis), and involves the death or destruction of the protagonist (catastrophe). A number of typically tragic themes could be added to the list: Bond’s exploration of the complex relationship between history and the individual, between the experience of necessity and the desire for freedom, has many dramatic precedents; and we find a particularly Shakespearean concern in the dilemma of reconciling the moral and political order of the play’s world.
Yet Bond undercuts these tragic moments as explicitly as Beckett does. The greatest ‘Scene of Suffering’ – the blinding of Lear – is also played as a grotesque piece of comedy. The Fourth Prisoner, with his scientific device for removing human eyeballs ‘based on a scouting toy I had as a boy’ (p.77), recalls the popular literary type of the mad professor, or the quack doctor common in commedia del arte. Bond’s method here, however, is derived not from Beckett but from Bertholt Brecht. It is an alienation device, designed to prevent our emotional identification with the character and instead make us consider and evaluate the situation from a detached perspective.
The cathartic emotions of pity and fear which, according to Aristotle, tragedy should provoke are antithetical to Bond’s purpose. He does not want us to empathise with his characters’ suffering on a personal level (although, as with Brecht, the power of his writing often makes this unavoidable) but to understand and respond to the social and political structures which have caused them. Paradoxically, pity is the emotion which Lear claims is vital: ‘You take too much pity out of me, if there’s no pity I shall die of this grief,’ (p.80), ‘Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad’ (p.98). (‘You only understand self-pity,’ Cordelia immediately counters, forcing us to re-evaluate what Lear has just said.)
Beckett, by contrast, does invite us to feel tragic pity for his characters. ‘Did anyone ever have pity on me?’ (p.130), Hamm asks. On one level, this is asked petulantly and self-pityingly. Yet it is also an appeal to the audience, not to look down on and laugh at him and his sufferings, but to identify with him as we would with the hero of a classical tragedy. After all, Beckett sees Hamm and his fellow characters’ situation as a representation of the essence of all human existence: as Aristotle explains, ‘pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves’ (Cooper ed., 1997)
However, Endgame offers none of the consolations which classical tragedy provides. For Aristotle, tragedy consists of action which must have a beginning, middle and an end. If nothing else, therefore, the end of the play brings us a sense of relief because the characters’ tribulations are finally over (or, in the case of Bond’s epic theatre, because we have learnt something). Edward Bond, who is a vociferous critic of Beckett, complains: ‘This is not the case with the theatre of the absurd. Here, life has been deprived of meaning: there is a beginning and an end, but no middle’ (Bond, 2000). In fact Endgame, like much of Beckett’s work, is one long ending which never quite comes. Its title, taken from chess, describes the final stages of a game which are entirely predictable, and therefore meaningless.
In this case, the game continues in an interminable stalemate. Beckett denies his characters, and the audience, the comfort of a conclusion. ‘Have you not had enough?’(p.94), ‘Do you not think this has gone on long enough?’ (p.114) Hamm asks Clov. Each time Clov instinctively replies ‘Yes!’ For Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell, even death would be preferable to a continuation of their current situation. When Hamm threatens to give him nothing more to eat, Clov seems happy with the prospect of starving to death. Hamm quickly comes up with a crueller threat: ‘I’ll give you just enough to keep you from dying’ (p.95). Although Nell appears to be dead by the end of the play, this cannot be seen as any sort of closure. The chances are they thought she was dead yesterday as well – it would be hard to tell anyway.
What the characters in Endgame long for is the ultimate release of tragedy: silence. This need is intensified because the sense of sight has already been taken away – Hamm is blind, while Clov can see nothing out of the window, even with the aid of a telescope. ‘Nearly finished. There’ll be no more speech.’ says Hamm (p.116). Clov dreams of ‘A world where all would be silent and still’ (p.120). ‘Speak no more,’ (p.133) are among Hamm’s last words. In fact Hamm appears to achieve the ideal of silence in the last lines of the play: ‘Since that’s the way we’re playing it… (he unfolds handkerchief) let’s play it that way … and speak no more about it … (he finishes unfolding) … speak no more …Old stancher! (Pause.) You … remain. (Pause. He covers his face …)’ This is the ideal of silence because, as David Hesla states in The Shape of Chaos (1971, p90), ‘If then I cry out, it is because I cannot be silent and still be suffering. But my ideal is to be silent-the silence of him who is Suffering-itself.’ Hamm’s act of veiling the face, of speaking no more, is just that-an act, a player at suffering-whose purpose it is to keep his suffering alive by exhibiting it to others, including himself as reflecting on himself as suffering. Suffering does not come into being by itself. It is made to be or brought into being by one’s decision to suffer or to be suffering and it is maintained in its being by one’s continued will to be suffering. Hamm’s great dream is of a world ‘where all would be silent and still, and each thing in it’s last place, under the last dust.’ (cited in Murray, 1970)
For Beckett, existence is miserable, and it is true that the protagonists of Beckett’s fiction and his drama do yearn for death, for the void, a condition usually defined as silence and darkness. The First Woman in Beckett’s Play is explicit: ‘Silence and darkness were all I asked. Well I get a certain amount of both. They being one. Perhaps it is sinful to pray for more.’ ( Jacobsen, 1966)
This brings to mind the dreamless sleep wished for by one of literature’s greatest tragic heroes: Hamlet. His famous last words, ‘The rest is silence,’ are generally taken to be valedictory. However, there is another side to this: just before he dies, Hamlet tells Horatio to: ‘absent thee from felicity awhile / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story’ (Jenkins ed., 1982). Silence is not enough: somebody must be able to explain what has happened and why, otherwise nothing will be learnt.
This is Edward Bond’s position. For Bond, silence in an instrument of the oppressor. This is seen graphically in the case of Warrington, who has his tongue cut out, and his hands broken for good measure, to stop him telling the truth. Bodice and Fontanelle order the captive Dukes of Cornwall and North to remain silent, depriving them of any chance to defend themselves: ‘Be silent! Not one word! There’s nothing to explain. My spies have learnt more about you than you know yourselves’ (p.61). Cordelia’s army uses the same methods: she has a prisoner shot because ‘He’d talk to anyone who caught him’ (p.58).
As in Endgame, the idea of silence is intensified in Lear by the theme of blindness. Tellingly, Lear’s first reaction to his blinding is an auditory one: ‘Aaahhh! The roaring in my head’ (p.78). ‘You hear very well when you’re blind,’ comments the Ghost (p.96), and Lear agrees. In his blindness, Lear learns to hear what his conscience is telling him. Others shut this out, as Lear himself used to. Cordelia complains that, ‘If you listened to everything your conscience told you you’d go mad’ (p.97). But at this point of the play, Lear is saner than he has ever been. Once again, the oppressive powers are advocating silence in order to drown out the truth.
Lear, however, refuses to ‘live in decent quietness’ (p.92), as the authorities tell him a man of his age should. ‘I can’t be silent’ (p.81), he vows. By Act III, ‘hundreds of people’ come to hear him preach the truth. Significantly, the parable we hear him tell deals with the same theme. First, the man tries to exploit the bird’s beautiful singing for his own personal gain: ‘Now I sing so beautifully I shall be rich and famous’ (p.89). But he finds that the bird can only groan and cry because he has put it in a cage. Later, when the birds are spreading the truth by singing ‘The king’s a fool’ all over the wood, the king mutilates the first bird ‘as a warning to all the other birds’ (just as Lear has the worker killed to set an example in the play’s opening scene). After this, ‘The forest was silent. And just as the bird had the man’s voice the man now had the bird’s pain. He ran round silently waving his head and stamping his feet, and he was locked up for the rest of his life in a cage’ (p.89). Silence is not, as in Beckett, a release from life’s tragedy, but a form of torture.
There is not, therefore, any catharsis in Lear’s death. The spectacle of a frail old man uselessly hacking away at the wall whose construction he once ordered seems as futile as anything in Beckett. For Bond, however, writers like Beckett of the theatre of the absurd ‘are trapped in the decadence of our time and have no rational view of the future or of anything else’ (1978). Bond sees his theatre as first and foremost a theatre of rationality. This is a quality it shares with ancient Greek tragedy. Bond writes: ‘Greek artists wrote about men and society as objectively as they could: that is, they wrote rationally’ (1978, p.x). Aristotle himself states that there must be a ‘necessary or probable connection’ between the events of tragedy (Cooper ed., 1997).
Bond insists that his vision is not pessimistic:
‘It might seem to [the play’s audience] that the truth is always ground for pessimism when it is discovered, but one soon comes to see it as an opportunity. Then you don’t have to go on doing things that never work in the hope that they might one day – because now you know why they can’t’ (1978, p.11).
This comes from Bond’s preface to Lear, but ironically it could also serve as an interpretation of Endgame. Like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, the characters in Endgame ‘go on doing things that never work in the hope that they might one day’ – a hope which is shown to be a vain one. Nevertheless, Beckett does not completely close off the opportunity for change: it is possible (depending on the actor or the reader’s interpretation) to imagine that, one day, Clov will leave and Vladimir will stop waiting. Indeed, the text is ambiguous enough to suggest that Clov could leave on this occasion.
Even if this does not happen, it is wrong to assume that Beckett’s message is a wholly pessimistic one. His characters may not learn, but we the audience are not obliged to share their bleak conclusions. We go away from the theatre with the knowledge that ‘doing things that never work in the hope that they might one day’ is pointless – the same truth that Bond’s Lear teaches, although presented in a very different way.
Bond is a didactic writer: he wants to explain how and why things work (or fail to work). Beckett has no such intentions: he gives us an image of how things are, and leaves us to interpret it as we will. In many ways, the two writers appear to be diametrically opposed: we have seen this in the scale and structure of their plays, in the way they evoke or deny the audience’s emotions and empathy, and especially in the way that they treat the idea of silence. The ways in which they have rewritten Aristotle’s tragic rulebook are, as we would expect, very different. Yet in drawing upon the formula of classical tragedy, both Beckett and Bond have created plays which remain highly powerful, searching and vitally relevant.
Works Cited
Aristotle, (1997), ‘Poetics’, in: Cooper, D. (ed), Aesthetics – The Classic Readings, Blackwell, Oxford
Beckett, S (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works, Faber and Faber, London
Beckett, S (1964), Endgame, Faber and Faber, London
Bond, E (1994), Lear, Methuen, London
Bond, E (1978), Plays: Two, Methuen, London
Bond, E (2000), L'Energie du sens, Editions Climats, Paris,
Bradley, A.C (1904) Shakespearean Tragedy
cited by Laboutierre, D (2000), Programme notes for Lear, available (Accessed: 2005, March 30)
Fletcher et al, (1978) A Students Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, Faber and Faber, London
Highfield, J (2005), Review of Bond’s Lear, The Stage, available: (Accessed: 2005, March 30)
Heslam, D.H (1971), The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Jacobsen, J (1966) The Testament of Samuel Beckett, Faber and Faber, London
Jenkins, H (ed) (1982), The Arden Shakespeare: Hamlet, Methuen, London
Murray, P (1970), The Tragic Comedian-A study of Samuel Beckett, Mercier Press, Cork
Roberts, P(1985), Bond on File, Methuen, London
Oslo Shakespeare Company (2004), Programme notes for Endgame, available: (Accessed: 2005, March 30)
Spencer, Jenny S (1992), Dramatic Sequences In The Plays Of Edward Bond, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
