Abstract
Orton once wrote, ‘Unlike Wilde I think you should put your genius into your work, not your life.’1 It is a sad reflection on this ambition, therefore, that Orton’s drama is so often judged in the context of his dramatic life and death. Martin Esslin begins a study of his plays with an account of the playwright’s imprisonment for defacing library books.2 His conviction that the plays are no more than an extension of a puerile desire to ‘shock at all costs’ leads him to diminish their importance. Esslin seems to allow his distaste for the antics of Orton to colour his evaluation of the work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: the Biography of Joe Orton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 334.
See Martin Esslin, Joe Orton: ‘The Comedy of (ILL) Manners’ in C.W.E. Bigsby (ed.), Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, Vol. 19, Contemporary English Drama (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 95–107.
C.W.E. Bigsby, Joe Orton (London: Methuen, 1982).
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 138.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), p. 36.
Michel Foucault ‘The Subject and Power’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 212.
Quoted in J.P. Stern, Nietzsche (London: Fontana, 1978), p. 146.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 The Use of Pleasure (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 244.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 86.
Maurice Charney, Joe Orton (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 85.
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 131.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 35.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 125.
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 95.
See Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Post-Modernism’ reprinted in Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), p. 145.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 280.
Quoted in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 154.
Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 76.
See Niall W. Slater, ‘Tragic Farce: Orton and Euripides’, in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol. 7 (1987), pp. 87–98.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1992 The Editorial Board, Lumìere Cooperative Press Ltd
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Page, A. (1992). An Age of Surfaces: Joe Orton’s Drama and Postmodernism. In: Page, A. (eds) The Death of the Playwright?. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21906-3_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21906-3_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-51316-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-21906-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)