Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, prof. Cavone, libro consigliato The Short Oxford English Literature, Sanders

Island (1904) that Shaw gained in England a wider popularity with his own plays. The play deals

with Larry Doyle, originally from Ireland, but who has turned his back on his heritage to fit in with

Tom Broadbent, his English business partner. Major Barbara was about an officer of the Salvation

Army, who learns from her father, a manufacturer of armaments, that money and power can be

better weapons against evil than love. Pygmalion, the best known of his comedies, is about a

professor of phonetics who makes a bet that he can train girl to pass for a duchess at an

ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important

element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid

British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. With Saint Joan

(1924), his masterpiece, Shaw was regarded as 'a second Shakespeare', who had revolutionized

the British theatre. Shaw did not portrait Joan of Arc, his protagonist, as a heroine or martyr, but as

a stubborn young woman. And as in classic tragedies, her flaw is fatal and brings about her

downfall. Uncommonly Shaw showed some sympathy to her judges. The play was written four

years after Joan was declared a saint. In his plays Shaw combined contemporary moral problems

with ironic tone and paradoxes. Discussion and intellectual acrobatics are the basis of his drama,

and before the emergence of the sound film, his plays were nearly impossible to adapt into screen.

During his long career, Shaw wrote over 50 plays.

Irish Theatre. W.B. Yeats was convinced that the theatre was the means with which to arouse the

consciousness of the people of Ireland, and he founded the Irish Theatre. His dream was to create

a theatre which rediscovered the vigour of classical Greece. In the years following the war, this

theatre played an important role in English culture.

Sean O’Casey. He was the last of the major early twentieth-century Irish playwrights to be

associated with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. A poor Protestant Dubliner by birth, he wrote about

what he knew best —the sounds, the rhetoric, the prejudices. The Shadow of a Gunman is set in a

back room in ‘Hilljoy’ Square at the time of the ‘Black and Tan’ repression in 1920. The action of

Juno and the Paycock also takes place in a single room in a two-room tenancy, though the period

has moved forward to the time of the Irish Civil War in 1922. The Plough and the Stars describes

the prelude to the eruption of the Easter Rising. In none of these three plays does he offer

apologies for the troubles of Ireland, or take sides with its oppressors or its supposed liberators.

The poor are seen as caught up in a struggle which disrupts their lives rather than enhances or

transfigures them.

Noel Coward. His works as a dramatist contrasts vividly with that of O’Casey. Coward combined

the talents of actor, composer, librettist, playwright, and poseur and his long career allowed each

aspect a more than ample expression. After uncertain theatrical beginnings in the immediately

post-war years he achieved a double succès de scandale with The Vortex, an exploration of the

condition of a drug-addict tormented by his mother’s adulteries, and the equally melodramatic The

Rat Trap, a study of the miserable marriage of a playwright and his novelist-wife. Hay Fever, an

elegantly malicious comedy, exposes both the eccentric, self centred rudeness of the Bliss family

and the bafflement of their conservative guests. In his major plays of the early 1930s, however,

Coward glanced freshly at the problems of the immediate past and the increasingly uneasy

present. The elaborately staged Cavalcade traces the fortunes and opinions of the Marryot family

in twenty-one short scenes covering the first years of the century, and includes episodes set

variously in drawing-rooms, theatres, bar parlours, railway stations, and even on board the Titanic.

His last great success, Blithe Spirit, written in five days, offered an essential escape from the

preoccupations of the ‘Home Front’ in the Second World War. It was a reassurance to families

parted by the war that death did not necessarily mark the end of a relationship.

John Priestley. He established his reputation as a novelist and this opened the gates to his career

as a dramatist, a career which ultimately included more than forty plays. His best-remembered and

most commonly revived plays, Time and the Conways, When We Are Married, and the mystery An

Inspector Calls, show a mastery of the conventional ‘well-made’ form and a tolerant sporting with

human folly. The two comedies in particular tend to reinforce the virtues of common sense and

stolidity rather than to challenge preconceptions as to the nature of society or the role of the

theatre.

Samuel Beckett. He spent part of his life in London but an even greater part of it in France. He

was a writer of novels and plays both before and after WWII. After the war he decided to settle

definitively in Paris and to adopt French as his literary language. Beckett’s prewar fiction in English

are the episodic novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the ten interconnected stories derived

from it and given the title More Pricks than Kicks), and the novel Murphy. The novel opens with the

protagonist having tied himself naked to a rocking chair in his apartment, rocking back and forth in

the dark. Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely

inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man’s

energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme

distinct from those of the outside world. After writing a number of stories and a novel, Beckett

began to work in a trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Meurt and L’Innommable. The protagonist of

these novels is a narrator of ever increasing decrepitude, whose ability to move diminishes towards

almost totality immobility. Meanwhile, as the trilogy progresses, the monologue of this

protagonist/narrator becomes less and less reliable as the narration of the story. The story tells the

reader that life is the expiation of the fault and death appears as the end to be desired. However, it

was his Waiting for Godot that gave him a wide international reputation. It soon came to be staged

all over the world. In the play, Beckett reduces conversation to a dialogue which never leads to

action and which declares itself as an empty speech-making, a succession of phrases exchanged

by the 2 protagonists to pass the time. Beckett puts at the centre of the play the act of waiting for

someone who will never appear. The dialogue of the characters is made up of leaps of logic, of

questions which presuppose no answer. In his next play, Fin de partie, Beckett proceeded in the

same direction, with an emphasis on the illogicality of the discourse. With the figure of the

protagonist, a paralyzed man on a wheelchair, he introduces an element which became very

important in his plays: the abolition of movement. Beckett’s next plays were mostly written in

English and include the successful Happy Days. When he uses silence, as in Film and the mime

play Act without Words II, he seems to be directing his audiences to explore the value of new

sensory and physical formulations. Beckett never plays with minimalism and reductionism simply

for the sake of the aesthetic effects he could achieve. In parallel to the work of certain Modernist

architects and composers, if without their puritan frugality, he was exploring the radical potential of

the idea that ‘less is more’. Time-present, as Beckett represents it in his plays, is broken,

inconsistent, and inconsequential. However, he often introduces a past which his always rich, as in

Krapp’s last Tape. In the play, Krapp, who seems to have recorded every aspect of his life, by

listening to these tapes, these little pieces of his past, manages to relive and review his life, events

long passed. The most interesting phenomenon that the viewer experiences while regarding this

play, then, is the feeling of regarding past events through several sets of eyes. Beckett created a

new form of Theatre know as the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement that included, among the

others, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard.

Harold Pinter. His point of departure was Beckett. In fact, the fascinations of Pinter’s theatre lies

above all in its use of language and the richness of a dialogue that at first sight appears banal.

Often it is the pauses and the silences that serve to communicate something. Pinter was a master

in showing how words can be used as a weapon. His best play, The Caretaker, takes place in a

single room, and it’s a psychological study of the confluence of power, allegiance, innocence and

corruption among the protagonists. It can be seen as symbolizing the struggle between youth and

adulthood. His other best play, The Homecoming, is set in London and presents six characters: 5

th

of them are men related to each other, the 6 is the wife of one of the men. The theme of the play

is about Teddy and his wife’s homecoming, which has different implications. Everything in the play

is unspecific, and it becomes tenser as the action progresses: surreal and astonishing things

happen and there are no boring moments. Pinter shows us what we fear deep down in our

relations with others.

Tom Stoppard. He is best remembered for his play Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead, an

absurdist existential tragicomedy that expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from

Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The action of the play takes place mainly in “the wings” of Shakespeare,

with brief appearances of major characters from Hamlet who enact fragments of the original

scenes.

John Osborne. His play Look Back in Anger, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London,

marked a ‘revolution’ in the history of the modern British theatre. The play takes place in a single

room, and the protagonist Jimmy emerges as the representative of the frustrated British youth of

the 50s. He is married to Alison, and shares his flat with Cliff. Alison is pregnant but unable to tell

him, fearing his rage. She decides to leave him, but after the loss of the baby, she returns to

Jimmy. The plot is circular, since the reality at the end is the same of the beginning. The roots of

Jimmy’s anger lie in his past, in his father’s death and on society which leaves no room to young

people. The play was a success on the London stage, and spawned the term "angry young men"

to describe Osborne and those of his generation who employed the harshness of realism in the

theatre in contrast to the more escapist theatre that characterized the previous generation. The

protagonist became the spokesman for the confused but profound dissatisfaction of an entire

generation. Osborne was not much of a formal innovator, but he could construct around the figure

of the rebel, situations and dramatic events of real theatrical power.

John Arden. Member of