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‘Learn by heart’: Beckett’s Schoolboy Copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth

‘Learn by heart’: Beckett’s Schoolboy Copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth This article discusses a recently discovered copy of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth that once belonged to Samuel Beckett when he was a student at Portora Royal in 1922. Although the volume is in private hands, scans of the annotated pages are freely available in the Beckett Digital Library of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Compared to other surviving works by and on Shakespeare in Beckett’s possession, the Macbeth schoolboy copy shows an unusual abundance of reading traces and marginalia. However, passages that are not underlined or otherwise marked turn out to be equally important for an assessment of the play’s impact on Beckett’s writing, in addition to a grey zone of indeterminate or conceptual references that are harder to classify as allusions. This is especially the case when Beckett’s style becomes sparser, and he explores other dramatic genres such as radio or television alongside prose and theatre. By way of introduction, the article analyses some of these instances in more detail while providing more context about the book’s provenance. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Beckett Studies Edinburgh University Press

‘Learn by heart’: Beckett’s Schoolboy Copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Journal of Beckett Studies , Volume 31 (2): 16 – Sep 1, 2022

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References (4)

Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh University Press
ISSN
0309-5207
eISSN
1759-7811
DOI
10.3366/jobs.2022.0371
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article discusses a recently discovered copy of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth that once belonged to Samuel Beckett when he was a student at Portora Royal in 1922. Although the volume is in private hands, scans of the annotated pages are freely available in the Beckett Digital Library of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Compared to other surviving works by and on Shakespeare in Beckett’s possession, the Macbeth schoolboy copy shows an unusual abundance of reading traces and marginalia. However, passages that are not underlined or otherwise marked turn out to be equally important for an assessment of the play’s impact on Beckett’s writing, in addition to a grey zone of indeterminate or conceptual references that are harder to classify as allusions. This is especially the case when Beckett’s style becomes sparser, and he explores other dramatic genres such as radio or television alongside prose and theatre. By way of introduction, the article analyses some of these instances in more detail while providing more context about the book’s provenance.

Journal

Journal of Beckett StudiesEdinburgh University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2022

There are no references for this article.