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| DRAMA, Short Analysis |
DRAMA, Short Analysis of :- ( Sweeney Agonistes: Eliot ), ( The Dreaming
of the Bones: Yeats ) & ( Endgame:
Samuel Beckett )
Modernism is cultural movements rooted
in the changes in Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. The term covers a series of reforming movements in art, architecture,
music, literature and the applied arts which emerged during this period. It could
be described as the experimentation and fragmentation of the human experience, that
break the norms of society.
Sweeney Agonistes and the dreaming of
the bones were written in the modernism era, which breaks sharply the naturalism
discourse of drama and stands against the idea of Naturalism.
Sweeney Agonistes: Eliot
This Drama represents the modern man who
is described as materialistic and shallow. Also represents the meaningless life
after the bad effects of war when people felt exhausted and looked depressed.
The thought is incomplete.
-Its
language is more poetic.
-The
syntax & words are straightforward and familiar but the compression,
repetition of words and sentences achieve strange effects, i.e.
"I
gotta use words when I talk to you" says Sweeney
-In
Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes, you can find that he dismissed the naturalist, he
believes that Prose drama is merely a slight by product of verse drama.
E.g.
1- A
dialogue on dramatic poetry.
E.g.
SWEENEY: I'll be the cannibal
DORIS: I'll be the missionary
I'll convert you
SWEENEY: I'll convert you
into a stew
A nice little, white little, missionary
stew
DORIS: You wouldn't eat me
SWEENEY: Yes I'd eat you
2- Recovering
original sources in religious liturgy.
Eliot, the playwriter and poet of the
Christian thoughts, uses religious issues which describes the Christianity's
belief, like presenting the idea of death and life.
E.g.
DORIS: That's not life, that's no life
Why I'd just as soon be dead
SWEENEY: That's what life is. just is
DORIS: What is?
What's that life is?
SWEENEY: Life is death.
3- The
repetition of certain sentences and words that are related to the drama themes,
such as "birth" and "death". These repetitions represent
the drama in a scene that locates the actors in a meaningless spot of life.
4- Using
symbols and familiar syntax and vocabulary.
E.g.
Symbols as:
"Crocodile"
symbolizes the evil
"Bamboo
tree" symbolizes the luck
"Coffin"
symbolizes the death
Familiar Vocabulary as:
"eggs",
"stew" and "cards"
5- Using
songs which belong to the world of minstrel shows, music hall and Gilbert and
Sullivian operetta.
6- Using
a pattern of allusion. "The title refers to Milton's poetic drama, Samson
Agonistes (1671), and to Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Victorian melodrama
who murdered his customers and made meat pies of them."
The Dreaming of the Bones: Yeats
The "Stranger" and the
"Young Girl," the two masked figures in the play, are revealed to be
the ghosts of Diarmuid MacMurrough and his wife Dervorgilla, who were
historical, & legendary, figures in Irish history. Yeats sets the play in
1916, just after the Easter Rising at the General Post Office in Dublin. The
"Young Man" is a patriot who participated in that event. When asked
to forgive Diarmuid and Dervorgilla for what they did, he almost does so but
finally refuses. According to some critics, Yeats associated this kind of
brittle, steady stance with his beloved Maud Gonne, while he tended to think that
such national self-hatred was part of Ireland's problem. When we read the play,
consider the significance of the masks. Consider also the circular
patterns--the endless repetition the lovers are in, the recurring image of the
music, "Red cocks, and crow!" With this example of Yeats' work we'll
get an introduction into his complex system(s) of religion, mythology, and
prophecy. The conception of the play is derived from the world-wide belief that
the dead dream back, for a certain time, through the more personal thoughts and
deeds of life. The wicked, according to Cornelius Agrippa, dream themselves to
be consumed by flames and persecuted by demons.
Endgame: Samuel Beckett
Themes
Cyclical, Repetitive Nature of
Beginnings and Endings
Endgame's opening lines repeat the word
"finished," and the rest of the play hammers away at the idea that
beginnings and endings are intertwined, that existence is cyclical. Beckett
also makes use of repetitions to underscore the cyclical stasis in Endgame. The
play repeats minute movements, from how many knocks Hamm makes on a wall and
how many Nagg makes on Nell's ashbin to how many steps Clov takes. The
repetitions prohibit the discernment of meanin.
Emptiness and Loneliness
The constant tension in
Endgame is whether Clov will leave Hamm or not. He threatens to and does
sometimes, but he is never able to make a clean break. Likewise, Hamm
continually tells Clov to leave him alone but pulls him back before an exit is
possible.
Theatre of the Absurd
Beckett was one of the French theatrical
movement called the Theatre of the Absurd. The Absurdists took a page from
Existentialist philosophy, believing that life was absurd, beyond human
rationality and meaningless.
Motifs
Chess
The "endgame" of chess is the series
of moves at the end of the game, one whose outcome is usually decided before
the formality of the endgame occurs. Beckett was a chess player and, in
Endgame, parallels the chess conceit to the endgame of life, in which death is
the inevitable outcome.
Symbols
Light and Darkness
Light connotes life and
death connotes darkness. Clov says he watches his light dying in his kitchen;
In this medium shade, the characters hold out tiny hope for life while
despairing under death's shade. Hamm's blindness is another gray lampshade. He
says he can feel the light on his face, and he cleans his glasses as if they
were useful to him. His blindness also lends an extra level of selfishness to
his refusal to give Mother Pegg his light.
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