Drama and Poetry in Beckett and Shakespeare

Beckett and Shakespeare bring poetry into play. Their dramatic works also reflect on themselves as products of the creative imagination when they use songs and poems. This lecture explores the many connections and transitions between poetry and drama in the works of both authors. Uncovering correspondences and suggestive relations between them, it offers fresh readings of their plays and poetry and describes how they redefine the link between poetry, music and the theatre. In looking at the musicality of language, and the inclusion of songs and poems into the plays, Claudia Olk analyses how literary and dramatic genres examine the nature of their very medium. Shakespeare’s sonnets, themselves dramas en miniature, draw attention to their poetic construction, often foregrounding processes of transformation between art and life. Studying these thresholds as well as poetic surfaces like the veil or the sheet, the lecture investigates into art’s representational potentialities. Its focus is on the resonant correspondences between both writers and the types of poetics that emerge from the encounter of the early modern and the modern texts.

Claudia Olk is Professor of English at Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich and Director of the Munich Shakespeare Library. She served as President of the German Shakespeare Society from 2014 until 2023. Her monographs include Travel and Narration (1999), Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision (2014), and Shakespeare and Beckett. Restless Echoes (2023).