“Some remains”: Forgetting Shakespeare in Endgame and Happy Days

Abstract

The smell of rotting corpses fills the world of Endgame, just as the image of burning flesh haunts the landscape of Happy Days. As in many of Beckett’s works, the human body in these early plays seems to be under an inexplicable attack, its form imprisoned, its parts dismembered. Just as the human form in Endgame is imprisoned by immobility and blindness, repetition and sterility, Happy Days dramatizes the human body in its slow and agonizing return to dust. In Winnie’s case, this display of the human form is first a presence, and then increasingly an absence, as her body is gradually transformed into earth. Beckett forces the viewer to acknowledge corporeality so that he can push toward its ultimate disappearance, for the smell of rotting and burning flesh in the early plays points to the ultimate destruction of that flesh in the late plays. Thus, the human body is slowly erased and dismembered, part by part, as his canon progresses. ¹ As Beckett stated in an interview, “My people seem to be falling to bits.”

Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

—Cymbeline 4.2.262–263