But Why Shakespeare? The Muted Role of Dickens in Endgame

Shakespearean dimensions of Endgame have been a mainstay of criticism of the play. Despite such broad hints as that from James Acheson’s influential article, “Chess with the Audience: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” the role of Dickens in Endgame has been curiously undervalued. In fact, the intertextual resonance between Dickens and Beckett’s play has been all but ignored. This essay asks one question: why has Dickens been ignored and Shakespeare so favored? It is fitting perhaps that in connection with a play concerned with orphans, the literary genealogy of Beckett’s play should be at issue. Close examination of Endgame and its characters show that allusions to both Shakespeare and Dickens conform to an aesthetic of lessening; the plenitude of the past becomes a diminished present, filled with the absences of that plenitude which was once possible. If this is the case, the privileging of Shakespeare over Dickens in critical discourse surrounding the play is in need of explanation. If one compares Beckett to Shakespeare, then the dynamic of influence moves from the tragic to the tragicomic, or from the tragic to the grotesque; from Hamlet to Hamm. If one compares Beckett to Dickens then the dynamic moves from the primarily comic to the primarily tragic; the optimistic Mr. Omer becomes the tragic Hamm. This chapter makes the case for Dickens in Endgame and reassesses the intertextual paradigms involved in Beckett’s use of his Victorian precursor. It is argued that the satisfying trajectory of decline, which has so often been traced from Shakespeare to Beckett, is challenged by the question: If the trajectory of deterioration is one which begins in the comic works of Dickens, in what does it end?.