7. Midcentury American Engagements with Evolution
Carol Bird, “Enter the Monkey Man,” Theatre Magazine, 1922, quoted in Erika Rundle, “The Hairy Ape’s Humanist Hell: Theatricality and Evolution in O’Neill’s ‘Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life,’” Eugene O’Neill Review 30 (2008): 51. This is Bird’s reaction on seeing The Hairy Ape, a play in whose “theatricalised ape-man figure” Bird recognized “a zeitgeist of post–WWI American drama” (55).
1. Peter Middleton, “Poetry, Physics, and the Scientific Attitude at Mid-Century,” Modernism/Modernity 21, no. 1 (2014): 147–68.
2. Paul Lifton, “Vast Encyclopedia”: The Theatre of Thornton Wilder (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 43.
3. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 316. See also Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
4. Bowler, Evolution, 316.
5. Woody Guthrie’s novel House of Earth (1947; New York: HarperCollins, 2013), for example, conveys this sense of optimism, “part of a broad philosophical vision of man’s place in nature” at this time, according to Gerald Mangan, “Adobe Solutions,” Times Literary Supplement, March 15, 2013.
6. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 61–69.
7. Michael Valdez Moses, “‘Saved from the Blessings of Civilization’: John Ford, the West, and American Vernacular Modernism” (paper presented at the Northern Modernisms seminar, University of Birmingham, March 15, 2013).
8. Christopher W. E. Bigsby, introduction to Plays by Susan Glaspell, ed. Christopher W. E. Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
9. Michael Billington, review of Alison’s House, Guardian, October 11, 2009, and “Glaspell Shorts,” Guardian, April 9, 2008, www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/apr/09/theatre (accessed October 12, 2013).
10. Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 8.
11. Mary Papke, “Susan Glaspell’s Naturalist Scenarios of Determinism and Blind Faith,” in Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell, ed. Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 25. Papke argues that in her mature novels, Glaspell interrogates monism, replacing it with her own brand of “impressionistic epistemology” (26), but the plays remain strongly influenced by Ernst Haeckel.
12. Barbara Ozieblo, Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 286n.16. Glaspell’s hagiography of George Cram Cook, The Road to the Temple (London: Benn, 1926), reveals the profound influence of Charles Darwin on Cook, ground through monistic and Spencerian mills, and shows how deeply Cook in turn shaped Glaspell’s views throughout her most creative period.
13. Quoted in Ozieblo, Susan Glaspell, 38; some of this paper Glaspell later included in Road to the Temple.
14. Linda Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 309. Bernice was produced in London at the Gate Theatre on October 30, 1925. The Era called it a play of “rare beauty” (quoted in Mary Papke, Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992], 42).
15. Susan Glaspell, Bernice, in Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and J. Ellen Gainor (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010), act 2, 103.
18. Papke, “Susan Glaspell’s Naturalist Scenarios,” 26. See also J. Ellen Gainor, Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–48 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 123.
19. Susan Glaspell, Inheritors, in Complete Plays, 191. As the editors note, in this scene the extended discussion of evolutionary ideas oscillates between Darwinism and social Darwinism.
24. Quoted in Barbara Ozieblo and Jerry Dickey, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell: American Modernist Women Dramatists (London: Routledge, 2008), 50.
25. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 230n.55.
26. Glaspell, Inheritors, 196. Inheritors is Glaspell’s reworking of her story from 1919, “Pollen.” See Papke, “Susan Glaspell’s Naturalist Scenarios,” 27. The play predates Barbara McClintock’s pioneering work in maize cytogenetics by almost a decade (she was taking her first course in genetics in 1921, while studying for her BSc in botany at Cornell—the period when Glaspell was working plant genetics into Inheritors and The Verge).
27. “A Brief Biography,” in Glaspell, Complete Plays, 3.
28. Susan Glaspell, The Outside, in Complete Plays, 59. The Outside was produced by the Provincetown Players at the Playwrights’ Theatre, New York (December 28, 1917 to January 3, 1918). The play emulates J. M. Synge’s and Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist dramas but adds a pointedly feminist slant.
29. Antoine, quoted in Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, 95–96. Maeterlinck became the greatest influence on her, especially his monism. He won the Nobel Prize in 1911, and while Glaspell was in Paris, his opera Monna Vanna and his play The Bluebird were staged.
30. Susan Glaspell, Close the Book, in Complete Plays, 46.
31. Glaspell, Inheritors, 188.
32. Susan Glaspell, Springs Eternal, in Complete Plays, 357.
33. Glaspell, Inheritors, 188–89. The premiere was by the Provincetown Players, Playwrights’ Theatre, New York (March 21 to April 10, 1921; additional performances on April 13 and 16). The first British production was at Liverpool Repertory Theatre (September 25, 1925), transferring for an extended run to London’s Everyman Theatre on December 28, 1925. Papke writes that the Liverpool production was called a “triumph” in a report wired to the New York Times (Susan Glaspell, 52).
34. Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), chap. 12.
35. The Verge was performed by the Provincetown Players, Playwrights’ Theatre, New York (November 14 to December 1, 1921; thirty-eight performances). Theatre Guild then took over the production, moving it uptown to the Garrick Theatre on West Thirty-fifth Street for special matinee performances (December 6–16, 1921), but it proved unprofitable there. It then returned to the Provincetown Players for a two-week run. See Papke, Susan Glaspell, 56.
36. Susan Glaspell, The Verge, in Complete Plays, 227; Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920).
37. Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1–2.
38. Ozieblo, Susan Glaspell, 189.
39. Glaspell, The Verge, act 1, 230.
41. Jörg Thomas Richter, “Generating Plants and Women: Intersecting Conceptions of Biological and Social Mutations in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge (1921),” in Making Mutations: Objects, Practices, Contexts, ed. Luis Campos and Alexander Von Schwerin (Munich, Max Planck Institutes, 2010), 71–84, http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P393.PDF (accessed May 16, 2013). See also Kristina Hinz-Bode, Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression: Language and Isolation in the Plays (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006), 172.
42. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 113.
43. August Strindberg to Torsten Hedlund, October 25, 1895, in Selected Essays by August Strindberg, ed. and trans. Michael Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13.
44. Steve Bottoms, “Building on the Abyss: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge in Production,” Theatre Topics 8, no. 2 (1998): 127–47.
45. Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 154.
46. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 121. In addition, the tower in the final act has a possible precedent in James A. Herne’s lighthouse in Shore Acres that prompted much critical attention at the time, as discussed previously.
47. Hugh Elliott, introduction to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, trans. Hugh Elliott (1914; repr., New York: Hafner, 1963), xviii.
48. Steve Jones, Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of Eden (London: Little, Brown, 2009).
49. Charles Darwin, “Autobiography, May 31, 1876,” in Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley: Autobiographies, ed. Gavin de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 75–80.
51. Bowler, Evolution, 268.
52. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), 63.
53. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 239.
54. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 121.
55. Michael M. Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (London: Palgrave, 2008), 65.
57. See, for example, Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
58. See, for example, Martin Nowak, with Roger Highfield, Supercooperators: The Mathematics of Evolution, Altruism and Human Behavior (Or Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012).
59. Katharine Cockin, Edith Craig (London: Continuum, 1998), 150.
60. Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, 309.
61. Ibid., 306. As mentioned, Emma Goldman had already published The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (Boston: Badger, 1914), based on her lectures on that topic.
62. “Experiment in Drama,” New Statesman 24, no. 599 (1924): 22.
63. Papke, Susan Glaspell, 66–67.
64. Quoted in Elizabeth Sprigge, Sybil Thorndike Casson (London: Gollancz, 1971), 171.
65. James Harrison, “Destiny or Descent? Responses to Darwin,” Mosaic 14, no. 1 (1981): 114.
66. Sybil Thorndike, “Religion and the Stage,” in Affirmations: God in the Modern World (London: Benn, 1928), 6–7, 11. She also expresses the view that “in each of us is contained in embryo every other human being” (23), hence the actor “is identified with all men” (25).
67. Sprigge, Sybil Thorndike Casson, 172. Over forty years later, Thorndike could still quote by heart some of Claire’s speeches. See also Jonathan Croall, Sybil Thorndike: A Star of Life (London: Haus, 2008), 188; and Sheridan Morley, Sybil Thorndike: A Life in the Theatre (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
68. Excerpted in Croall, Sybil Thorndike, 188–89.
69. John C. Trewin, Sybil Thorndike (London: Rockliff, 1955), 53.
70. See, especially, Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter, Eng.: University of Exeter Press, 2002), and London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror (Exeter, Eng.: University of Exeter Press, 2007).
71. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 139.
72. Edy Craig was connected to all the major “formal and technical experiments in art theatre by male theatre practitioners at this time,” such as Edward Gordon Craig (her brother) at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912, Lugne-Poë and Jacques Copeau in France, Max Reinhardt in Germany, and Adolphe Appia’s ideas about lighting. See Katharine Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947): Dramatic Lives (London: Cassell, 1998), 121.
73. Sprigge, Sybil Thorndike Casson, 139.
74. Croall, Sybil Thorndike, 190.
75. Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981), 146–50. Virginia Woolf reviewed the London production in 1925 of The Verge in the New Statesman (along with Desmond McCarthy); so did Cicely Hamilton in Time and Tide. See Cockin, Edith Craig, 127.
76. Croall, Sybil Thorndike, 189.
79. Cockin, Edith Craig, 150.
80. Ozieblo, Susan Glaspell, 270.
81. Glaspell, Springs Eternal, 357.
87. Veronica Makowsky, “Susan Glaspell and Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 49.
88. Bottoms, “Building on the Abyss,” 137.
89. Ozieblo and Dickey, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell, 13. Similarly, Ben-Zvi and Gainor say that much of Glaspell’s work is a “curious blend of traditional and progressive perspectives” (Glaspell, Complete Plays, 37).
91. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Organon for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 229; his essay on Shaw is also in this edition (“Three Cheers for Shaw,” 28–31).
92. See, for example, Bertolt Brecht, “The Street Scene” (“how thoroughly he has to imitate”), in Brecht on Theatre, 176–77.
93. Astrid Oesmann, Staging History: Brecht’s Social Concepts of Ideology (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 26.
94. Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” in Brecht on Theatre, 65.
95. Oesmann, Staging History, 20–21.
97. Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (London: Routledge, 2010), 169.
98. Lifton, “Vast Encyclopedia,” 35–36.
100. The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–61, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 22.
101. Ibid., 21. The Skin of Our Teeth was finished on January 1, 1942; after tryouts in New Haven and Baltimore, it opened in New York at the Plymouth Theatre on November 18, 1942. “The period from January 1942, when Wilder finished The Skin of Our Teeth, until May 1943, when he left for active military duty in North Africa, was one of the most active in Wilder’s life” (“Thornton Wilder: January 1942 to May 1943,” in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996], 377). He was working on finding a producer for his play and writing scripts for two army training films and for Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.
102. Journals of Thornton Wilder, 26.
103. Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth, in Three Plays (New York: Avon, 1957), xii.
104. Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Thornton Wilder (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 75.
105. Wilder, Skin of Our Teeth, act 1, 91.
106. Byron’s “cosmic drama” Cain (1821) retold the story of Cain and Abel from Cain’s point of view; it also explored the theme of catastrophism as a way of explaining gaps in the fossil record and “played fast and loose with the illustrious name of Georges Cuvier” (Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007], 7).
107. Wilder, Skin of Our Teeth, act 1, 72.
111. Lifton, “Vast Encyclopedia,” 43. Haeckel is not mentioned in Lifton’s book.
113. Lifton acknowledges a possible influence from Shaw’s Creative Evolution on Wilder’s concept of nature’s workings but says it is much more likely that Goethe’s idea of ewig Wirkende, the “perpetually achieving force at work in the universe,” shaped his thinking about evolution, as Wilder envisions an optimistic nature that is ever striving to improve. He had a “faith in nature’s benevolence” (Lifton, “Vast Encyclopedia,” 41).
114. Wilder had been reading Finnegans Wake, and he stated this in his preface to Three Plays in response to a scandal surrounding accusations of plagiarism. Christopher W. E. Bigsby notes clear parallels between the two works, including the Antrobuses and the Earwickers, Lily Sabina and Lily Kinsella, and the fact that both “move their characters through different historical periods,” but sees this not as plagiarism but homage (A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, 1900–1940 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 269–70). See also Gilbert A. Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), chap. 18.
115. Four plays were written by e. e. (Edward Estlin) cummings, each one utterly different from the other in mode. If there is one unifying idea, it is the role of the artist in society. They are also notable for their evolutionary ideas. Santa Claus (1946) is, like Brecht’s Life of Galileo, informed by the development of the atomic bomb, and it is clearly against science: it is “an American version of a Faust story” in which Santa wears a death mask (given to him by Death) and is called “Science” and is persuaded by Death that all people really want in this age is knowledge without understanding. Santa/Science becomes a salesman. See Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (New York: Liveright, 1980), 407–8. Kennedy does not refer at all to Anthropos, and does not mention Wilder.
116. Bigsby, Critical Introduction, 270.
117. Journals of Thornton Wilder, 37. His journal also indicates that he excised early material dealing with “natural history . . . the arch of the natural world that surrounds us” (38).
118. Lifton, “Vast Encyclopedia,” 42.
119. Wilder, Skin of Our Teeth, act 2, 95.
120. Ibid., act 2, 95–96.
121. Lifton, “Vast Encyclopedia,” 42.
122. Wilder, Skin of Our Teeth, act 2, 115–18.
123. Ibid., act 2, 98–99.
125. The play opened on September 8, 1949, at St. Martin’s Theatre, London, and ran for forty-three performances; it was produced by Michael Macowan. See William Konkle, “J. B. Priestly (1894–1984),” in British Playwrights, 1880–1956: A Research and Production Sourcebook, ed. William Demastes and Katherine E. Kelly (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 332.
126. J. B. Priestley, Summer Day’s Dream, in Plays Two (London: Oberon, 2004), 2.1, 175–76.
127. Tom Priestley, introduction to Priestley, Plays Two, 10.
128. Priestley, Summer Day’s Dream, 1.1, 107.
132. Tom Priestley, introduction to Priestley, Plays Two, 11.
133. Priestley, Summer Day’s Dream, 2.2, 185.
134. Maggie B. Gale, J. B. Priestley (London: Routledge, 2008), 119.
136. Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 162.
137. Eugene O’Neill, The First Man, in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays, 1920–1931, ed. Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), act 1, 59. For a discussion of this play, see, for example, Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 150.
138. Rundle, “Hairy Ape’s Humanist Hell,” 50. The Hairy Ape was first produced at the Playwrights Theater in New York in March 1922, receiving good reviews, and transferring quickly to Broadway in April at the Plymouth Theater for 127 performances.
141. Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape, in The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Modern Library, 1941), 1:39.
142. Bogard, Contour in Time, 242.
143. Rundle, “Hairy Ape’s Humanist Hell,” 54.
144. Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan, December 24, 1921, quoted in Bogard, Contour in Time, 241.
145. Peter Egri, “‘Belonging’ Lost: Alienation and Dramatic Form in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape,” in Critical Essays on Eugene O’Neill, ed. James J. Martine (Boston: Hall, 1984), 108.
146. Bogard, Contour in Time, 248.
147. Rundle, “Hairy Ape’s Humanist Hell,” 51.
148. Bogard, Contour in Time, 251.
151. Rundle analyzes this connection in detail in “Hairy Ape’s Humanist Hell,” 72.
152. Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), quoted in Bogard, Contour in Time, 243–44.
153. Inherit the Wind played at the National Theater, New York (April 21, 1955 to June 22, 1957) for a total of 806 performances. It won several Tony awards in 1956.
154. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind (New York: Bantam Books, 1955), 115.
155. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 243.
156. Quoted in ibid., 243.
157. Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: Norton, 1983), 270, 273, quoted in ibid., 245.
158. Ullica Segerstråle, “Neo-Darwinism,” in Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Mark D. Pagel, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2:809.
8. Beckett’s “Old Muckball”
1. See, for example, Dan Rebellato, 1956 and All That (London: Routledge, 1999); and John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (London: Methuen, 1962). Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris in 1953 and in London in 1955 and (after its American premiere in Florida) had its Broadway premiere in April 1956. Look Back in Anger premiered in London in May 1956.
2. Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 3, quoted in Linda Ben-Zvi, introduction to Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. The phrase “so various, so beautiful, so new” is from Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (published 1861).
3. Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (London: Routledge, 2011), 171.
4. Ben Brantley, “When a Universe Reels, a Baryshnikov May Fall,” New York Times, December 19, 2007.
5. James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 1979), 94.
6. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), act 2, 57, hereafter CDW. “Muckheap” also occurs in Rough for Theatre I, though in the sense not of the earth but as something “we’re heading for” (Samuel Beckett: Collected Shorter Plays [London: Faber and Faber, 2006], 69, hereafter CSP).
7. Steven Connor, “Beckett’s Atmospheres,” in Beckett After Beckett, ed. Stanley E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 57.
8. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, Waiting for Godot, ed. Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson (New York: Grove Press, 1993), xiv. This elemental thinking is already evident in the notes on philosophy that he took in the early 1930s.
9. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 2, 60.
10. Chris J. Ackerley, “Samuel Beckett and Science,” in A Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Stanley E. Gontarski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 144.
12. Paul Davies, “Beckett from the Perspective of Ecocriticism,” in Beckett After Beckett, ed. Gontarski and Uhlmann, 72.
14. Cyril D. Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 673.
15. Cless, Ecology and Environment, 15.
16. Joseph Roach, “‘All the Dead Voices’: The Landscape of Famine in Waiting for Godot,” in Land/Scape/Theater, ed. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 85.
20. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, in CDW, act 2, 161. The words muck, muckball, and muckheap all appear frequently in Beckett’s prose and theatre; see, for example, Molloy’s “But it’s a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn’t matter, it’s good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another a little further one, from time to time” (Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable [New York: Grove Press, 2005], 41).
21. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 73, and Happy Days, act 1, 150.
22. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 263.
23. Connor, “Beckett’s Atmospheres,” 52.
25. Samuel Beckett, “Whoroscope” notebook, 63, Beckett Collection, University of Reading.
26. Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (New York: Continuum, 2006), 1.
27. Shane Weller, foreword to ibid., viii.
29. Rita Felski, “‘Context Stinks!’” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 573.
30. Weller, foreword to Feldman, Beckett’s Books, ix.
33. Karim Mamdani, “Conclusion: Beckett in Theses,” in Beckett/Philosophy, ed. Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani (Sophia, Bulgaria: University Press St. Klimrnt Ohridski, 2012), 312. “Interlocutor” is David Addyman’s term, in “‘Speak of Time, Without Flinching . . . Treat of Space with the Same Easy Grace’: Beckett, Bergson and the Philosophy of Space,” in ibid., 68–88.
34. Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London: Routledge, 2002), 7.
35. Linda Ben-Zvi, “Biographical, Textual and Historical Origins,” in Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 133–53.
36. Stanley E. Gontarski notes that the original French, “Les gens sont des cons,” does not have the Darwinian implications of the translation, in “A Centenary of Missed Opportunities: A Guide to Assembling an Accurate Volume of Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic ‘Shorts,’” Modern Drama 54, no. 3 (2011): 364.
37. Frederik N. Smith, “Dating the Whoroscope Notebook,” Journal of Beckett Studies 3, no. 1 (1993), manuscript in typescript, Beckett Collection, University of Reading. Smith does not elaborate on what the latter reference might be.
39. Samuel Beckett to Tom MacGreevy, August 4, 1932, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 111.
40. Ibid. On the marginalia in Beckett’s copy of On the Origin of Species, see Dirk Van Hulle, “Notebooks and Other Manuscripts,” in Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 421; and Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7.
41. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, facsimile of the first edition, ed. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 11–12.
43. Michael Beausang, “Watt: Logique, démence, aphasie,” in Beckett avant Beckett: Essais sur les premières œuvres, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Paris: Accents, 1984), 153–72.
44. The word whimsical also occurs early in Beckett’s “Whoroscope” notebook.
45. Valerie Purton, ed., Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science (London: Anthem, 2013), xvi.
46. Beckett, quoted in Feldman, Beckett’s Books, 71.
48. See, for example, Erik Tonning, “‘I Am Not Reading Philosophy’: Beckett and Schopenhauer,” in Beckett/Philosophy, ed. Feldman and Mamdani, 44–67.
49. Dirk Van Hulle, “‘Eff it’: Beckett and Linguistic Skepticism,” in ibid., 225.
52. Peter Fifield, “‘Of Being—or Remaining’: Beckett and Early Greek Philosophy,” in Beckett/Philosophy, ed. Feldman and Mamdani, 89–109, and personal correspondence with the author, May 8, 2013.
53. Fifield, “‘Of Being—or Remaining,’” 98.
54. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (London: Penguin, 2009), 255.
55. Jessica Whiteside, “Wedges and Impacts: Darwin’s Enduring Legacy,” Brown Medicine, spring 2009, 2.
56. Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 346.
57. John Pilling, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook,” in The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories and Translations, ed. Stanley E. Gontarski (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 87. Ackerley summarizes the key references to rocks in Beckett’s work in “Samuel Beckett and Science,” 145. See also “Geology,” in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought, ed. Christopher J. Ackerley and Stanley E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 2004), 220.
59. There is also a link with Shaw, whose wise Ancient in Back to Methuselah characterizes the earth in a poetic vision that likewise uses the dead fish as metaphor for vast geological changes: “In the hardpressed heart of the earth, where the inconceivable heat of the sun still glows, the stone lives in fierce atomic convulsion, as we live in our slower way. When it is cast out to the surface it dies like a deep-sea fish: what you see is only its cold dead body” (Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw [London: Constable, 1931], part 5, 958).
60. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 7. See also Jane Goodall, “Popular Culture,” in Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Gontarski and Uhlmann, 289–98.
61. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 201–4.
62. Jane Goodall, personal correspondence with author, January 20, 2012.
63. Andrew Gibson, Samuel Beckett (London: Reaktion, 2010), 90–92.
64. Ibid., 90, 92. Feldman argues that Beckett’s psychosomatic expression has been overstated by scholars, in Beckett’s Books, 86.
65. Pietro Corsi, “Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: From Myth to History,” in Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology, ed. Snait B. Gissis and Eva Jablonka (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 20.
66. Beausang, “Watt,” 160. My thanks to Richard Parish for help with this translation.
67. Samuel Beckett, Watt, ed. Christopher Ackerley (London: Faber, 2009).
69. Beausang, “Watt,” 163.
71. Feldman notes that “uterine tropes” abound in Beckett’s works, in Beckett’s Books, 107.
72. Samuel Beckett, All That Fall, in CSP, 36.
73. John P. Mahaffy, Descartes (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1901), quoted in Francis Doherty, “Mahaffy’s Whoroscope,” in Beckett Critical Reader, ed. Gontarski, 21.
74. Samuel Beckett, quoted in Feldman, Beckett’s Books, 86.
75. Beckett, All That Fall, 16, 31. The Rooneys speculate, “Can hinnies procreate, I wonder?” (36), a question that brings Mr. Rooney up sharp. They discuss this. “Aren’t they barren, or sterile?” (37). Their childlessness makes this emphasis on sterility especially significant.
76. Quoted in Cohn, Beckett Canon, 233.
77. Beckett, All That Fall, 17.
78. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 50, 86.
80. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in CSP, 59.
81. Beckett, Rough for Theatre I, 70.
82. Gontarski, “Centenary of Missed Opportunities,” 380.
83. James Harrison, “Destiny or Descent? Responses to Darwin,” Mosaic 14, no. 1 (1981): 119.
84. Beckett, Rough for Theatre I, 72.
85. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 2001), 72, quoted in Cless, Ecology and Environment, 213.
86. Cohn, Beckett Canon, 179.
87. Jane Goodall, “Lucky’s Energy,” in Beckett After Beckett, ed. Gontarski and Uhlmann, 190.
88. Quoted in Gontarski, “Centenary of Missed Opportunities, 362.
89. T. H. Huxley, quoted in Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Uses of Extinction,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 2 (2009): 329.
90. Joseph Roach, “Darwin’s Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature’s Stage,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 13, no. 1 (1990): 56.
91. Katharine Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 22–47.
92. Kathryn White, Beckett and Decay (London: Continuum, 2009).
93. Roach, “‘All the Dead Voices,’” 92.
94. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 1, 39.
95. Samuel Beckett, Rough for Theatre II, in CSP, 71, 82.
96. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 1, 24. The term is also mentioned explicitly in How It Is: “I was young I clung on to the species we’re talking of the species the human.”
97. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 1, 28–29; act 2, 78.
99. Beckett, All That Fall, 23. Note that Beckett refers to “this wretched planet” in a letter to Robert Pinget in 1966. See Lois More Overbeck, “Audience of Self/Audience of Reader,” Modernism/Modernity 18, no. 4 (2011): 723.
100. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 2, 79–80.
101. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 104.
102. Ulrika Maude, “Pavlov’s Dogs and Other Animals in Samuel Beckett,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 82.
103. Beckett, Happy Days, act 2, 166.
104. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 95–96.
105. Beckett, Happy Days, act 1, 151.
107. Ibid., 153. Pilling points out that Beckett directs this section of the text to be delivered at a very slow pace, compared with the deliberately fast and garbled section recalling her episode with the mouse, indicating that the lines about adaptation should be unmistakable and clear. See Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 107.
108. Beckett, Happy Days, act 1, 154.
112. Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), 169–81.
113. Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 67; full discussion of Kafka’s story, 66–72. See also Shane Weller, “Forms of Weakness: Animalisation in Kafka and Beckett,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Bryden, 13.
114. In a recent stage version starring Kathryn Hunter as the “creature stranded between a human present and a simian past,” he subtly conveys “dark messages about humanity’s bestiality.” His initial capture and captivity were so brutal that “‘I’m still overcome with such an aversion to human beings, I can barely stop myself from retching.’” Ultimately, his “forced march up the evolutionary scale” has left him isolated (Charles Isherwood, “A Captive of Human Nature” [review of Kafka’s Monkey], New York Times, April 4, 2013). So convincingly did Hunter portray Red Peter’s “ape-ness” that “if you squinted, you would probably believe that the creature onstage was a real chimpanzee in white tie and tails.” Kafka’s Monkey was adapted by Colin Teevan from Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” for the Young Vic and first performed there by Kathryn Hunter in 2009; the New York production in 2013 was for Theatre for a New Audience.
115. Becket, Happy Days, act 1, 147. In his notes to the German production of Happy Days in September 1971, Beckett gave detailed movements for Willie in his final moments on mound, which he must clutch (a term used twice), not looking at Winnie until he collapses and lies completely motionless in this position until the end of the play (MS 1396/4/10, 5, Beckett Collection, University of Reading).
116. Feldman, Beckett’s Books, 106.
117. Maude, “Pavlov’s Dogs and Other Animals,” 89.
118. Beckett, Happy Days, act 1, 145–46.
119. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 97.
120. See, for example, Yoshiki Tajiri, “Beckett, Coetzee and Animals,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Bryden, 37.
121. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 96.
122. John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 56–59.
123. Overbeck, “Audience of Self/Audience of Reader,” 722.
124. See, for example, Bernard Shaw’s discussion of it in the “Paley’s Watch” section of his preface to Back to Methuselah, in Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable, 1934), 495–96.
125. Beckett, Rough for Theatre II, 81.
127. Cohn refers to the birds as thrushes (Beckett Canon, 242), but Beckett’s term in the original French is pinson (chaffinch). See Samuel Beckett, Pas, suivi de quatre esquisses (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1978), 60. His detailed description indicates that “they are probably blue-capped parrot finches” (Linda Ben-Zvi, “Beckett’s ‘Necessary’ Cat[s],” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Bryden, 137n.22).
128. Beckett, Rough for Theatre I, 67, 69.
129. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 229.
130. Fifield, “‘Of Being—or Remaining,’” 97.
131. Beer, “Darwin and the Uses of Extinction,” 323.
133. “These human beings are the last of their species” (Cohn, Beckett Canon, 226).
134. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 93.
136. Cohn, Beckett Canon, 227.
139. Ibid., 231, referring to Robert Haerdter, Samuel Beckett inszeniert das “Endspiel” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 50.
140. Roach, “‘All the Dead Voices,’” 89, citing Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, 1:109.
142. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (London: Belknap, 2009).
143. Cohn, Beckett Canon, 264.
144. Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 30.
145. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 34.
146. David Wheatley, “‘Quite Exceptionally Anthropoid’: Species Anxiety and Metamorphosis in Beckett’s Humans and Other Animals,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Bryden, 61. On Beckett’s antieugenic stance, see also Gibson, Samuel Beckett.
147. Samuel Beckett, Eleuthéria, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 44–45.
148. Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 25. In Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp follows a gnostic, even “specifically Manichean tradition,” emphasizing sexual abstinence and refusal to marry, “so as not to play the Creator’s game” (86–87). Feldman likewise sees “this old muckball” as evidence of the thoroughgoing gnosticism of the play, in Beckett’s Books, 4.
150. David Bradby calls Les Mamelles de Tiresias a “famous predecessor” to Godot, but he does not say why, in Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Plays in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54. James Knowlson notes that Eleuthéria indicates Beckett’s attitudes toward the theatre of the past, parodying “many features of traditional plays and experiments,” yet he makes no mention of Apollinaire’s Mamelles as a possible precedent, in Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 363–64.
151. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, in Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada and Surrealism, an Anthology of Plays, ed. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth (New York: Dutton, 1964), 81.
152. Davies, “Beckett from the Perspective of Ecocriticism,” 74.
153. Chris Ackerley, “‘Despised for the Obviousness’: Samuel Beckett’s Dogs,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Bryden, 186–87.
Epilogue
1. Richard Bean, The Heretic (London: Oberon, 2011), act 3, 58.
2. Him ends with a freak show scene, complete with a hunchback barker and eight freaks, including a missing link and a fat lady. It’s Me’s “psychic fantasy” as she gives birth, and the barker pulls back the curtain to reveal Me holding her newborn baby.
3. Jill Lepore, “The Odyssey: Robert Ripley and His World,” New Yorker, June 3, 2013, 62–65. Ripley insisted, “I only deal in oddities, not freaks,” and made the distinction that “an oddity is a high-class freak.”
4. Tony Kushner, jacket copy for Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996). Another play apparently dealing with this character is Hottentot Venus (1981) by Brian Rotman, but I have been unable to locate a published copy of it.
8. Francis Galton, preface to Hereditary Genius (London: Macmillan, 1892).
9. Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution (London: Icon, 2011), 3.
10. Jonathan Hodgkin, “Thin and Fat from the Start,” review of The Epigenetic Revolution, by Nessa Carey, TLS, May 4, 2012, 24.
11. See, for example, Edward J. Steele, Lamarck’s Signature: How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin’s Natural Selection Paradigm (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1998).
14. Philip Ball, Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People (London: Bodley Head, 2011). As Gillian Beer points out, in the Frankenstein story, which is, like Faust, one of the most powerful myths around a negative image of the scientist, there is creation without growth: “He is a creature denied the experience of growth. He is fabricated as if he were a machine, but out of organic bits and pieces. There is a gap between concept and material” (Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 103).
15. See, for example, Ric Knowles, ed., “Interspecies Performance,” special issue, Theatre Journal 65, no. 3 (2013): Ric Knowles, “Editorial Comment: Interspecies Performance,” i–v; Una Chaudhuri, “Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality,” 321–34; Courtney Ryan, “Playing with Plants,” 335–53; Susan Nance, “Game Stallions and Other ‘Horseface Minstrelsies’ of the American Turf,” 355–72; and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, “Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse,” 373–93.
16. Una Chaudhuri, “Animal Geographies: Zooësis and the Space of Modern Drama,” in Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. Gabriella Giannachi and Nigel Stewart (Oxford: Lang, 2005), 103–4.
17. Katharine Worth, “Edward Albee: Playwright of Evolution,” in Essays on Contemporary American Drama, ed. Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim (Munich: Hueber, 1981), 33–53. See also Toby Zinman, Edward Albee (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 1–9, 79–86.
18. Charles Isherwood, “A Captive of Human Nature” [review of Kafka’s Monkey], New York Times, April 4, 2013. Kafka’s Monkey, adapted by Colin Teevan, based on “A Report to an Academy,” by Franz Kafka; directed by Walter Meierjohann. A Young Vic production (premiered 2009), presented by Theater for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director, in association with Baryshnikov Arts Center. At the Jerome Robbins Theater, Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York.
19. Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (London: Routledge, 2010), 16.
20. Julie Hudson, “‘If You Want to Be Green Hold Your Breath’: Climate Change in British Theatre,” New Theatre Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2012): 261.
21. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “It’s Good to Be Alive,” London Review of Books, February 9, 2012, 36.
22. William Flesch, “Acting Together,” review of Theatre and Mind, by Bruce McConachie, TLS, September 20, 2013, 29.