Shorter Plays, Volume 4: The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett [Box set] [Hardcover]

Samuel Beckett (Author), S. E. Gontarski (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 080211654X | ISBN-13: 978-0802116543 | Publication Date: September 1999 | Edition: 4th annotated edition

Shorter Plays follows Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape in this highly praised series of Beckett's notebooks, which show for the first time the extensive revisions made by Beckett during revivals of his plays and presents the complete and definitive texts for Play, Footfalls, Come and Go, What Where, That Time, Eh Joe, and Not I. From the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett himself directed all his major plays in Berlin, Paris, and London. For most of these productions he meticulously prepared notebooks for his personal use. Beckett's theatrical notebooks, which are reproduced in facsimile here, offer a remarkable record of his involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to the practical problems of staging and also provide a unique insight into the way he envisaged his own plays. With additional information taken from Beckett's annotated and corrected copies of the plays, and using his experience as a director and scholar, S. E. Gontarski has been able to constitute a revised text for each of the plays, incorporating Beckett's many changes, corrections, additions, and cuts.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Theatrical Notebooks . . . are invaluable maps of Beckett country." -- Mel Gussow, The New York Times

"A gold mine for Beckett fans who wish to dig for anecdotes, incidents, illusions, and analogies that appear throughout almost everything else he wrote. . . . Grove is to be commended for the care lavished on the design of these volumes, for they are physically as handsome as their content is comprehensive." -- Deirdre Blair, Newsday

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 4th annotated edition edition (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080211654X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116543
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 8 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,912,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and followed it with essays and two novels before World War Two. He wrote one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the theatre until his death in 1989.