Catastrophe in the Context of Dramatic Form and Theory
ENDS AND MEANS: Catastrophe in the Context of Dramatic Form and Theory Criticism on Beckett's play, Catastrophe, has often taken note of the dramatic associations of the title. Several critics - Zeifman and McMillan, for example - have highlighted the connection between the etymological connotations of catastrophe and its theatrical associations. 1 "The Director is using the word 'catastrophe, '" writes McMillan, "partly in the every day sense of 'disaster' ( ... ). But he is also using the word in its more technical, theatrical sense, derived from its Greek roots, kata, (down), strophien (turn), to allude to the scene of classical tragedy depicting the downward turn of the protagonist's fortunes" (98). Other critics, including Libera, States, Brater, Sandberg, and Lyons, have referred at some point in their reading of the play to the theatrical connotations of catastrophe. 2 Lyons has perhaps gone furthest in reading the play in relation to the legacy of dramatic catastrophe: "The term 'catastrophe'," Lyons asserts, "has come to signify a structural part of tragedy, that dramatized moment in which the hero suffers the ultimate reversal. The literal meaning of the Greek noun, a turning up and down, held a more encompassing and less technical significance in the language of the tragic poets" (91). Though as Lyons notes, the Greek tragic poets used the term catastrophe in a variety of telling ways, Aristotle, contrary to popular opinion, did not use the term "catastrophe" in The Poetics. 3 Rather did the term enter the parlance of European drama and dramatic criticism by way of Donatus, the fourth century C.E.
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