Critics have recently begun to pay attention to the influence Jean Racine's plays had on the work of Samuel Beckett, noting his 1930–31 lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and echoes of Racine in early texts such as Murphy (1938). This essay suggests that as well as the Trinity lectures, Beckett's later re-reading of Racine (in 1956) can be seen as fundamentally influential on his drama. There are moments of direct allusion to Racine's work, as in Oh les beaux jours (1963), where the echoes are easily discernible; but I suggest that soon, in particular with Come and Go (1965), the characteristics of a distinctly Racinian stagecraft become more subtly apparent, in what Danièle de Ruyter has called ‘choix plus spécifiquement théâtraux’: pared-down lighting, carefully-crafted entries and exits, and visual tableaux made increasingly difficult to read. Through an account of Racine's dramaturgy, and the ways in which he structures bodily motion and theatrical talk, I suggest that Beckett's post-1956 drama can be better understood, as stage-spectacles, in the light of Racine's plays; both writers give us, in Myriam Jeantroux's phrase, the complicated spectacle of ‘un lieu à la fois désert et clôturé’. As spectators to Beckett's drama, by keeping Racine in mind we can come to understand better the limitations of that spectatorship, and how the later plays trouble our ability to see – and interpret – the figures that move before us.
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