The Making of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot

This volume of the BDMP analyses the genesis of En attendant Godot. Samuel Beckett wrote his most famous play between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949, as a relaxation from the ‘awful prose’ of the trilogy he was writing at the time, and it soon became a worldwide success after its Paris premiere at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953. Having little to no experience in the theatre, Beckett significantly revised the text in rehearsal and in the English translation that followed in 1954, a pattern which continued in the following decades, when he frequently directed his own plays in multiple languages. This study of Godot’s making charts both the genetic and the epigenetic or postpublication development of the text, in French and in English, bringing new documents and versions to light. Being the one play that spans Beckett’s entire dramaturgical and directorial career, it bears unique testimony to his continuously changing understanding of theatre, so that a ‘definitive’ version seems almost as elusive as its protagonist.

This volume is part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), a collaboration between the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Beckett International Foundation (University of Reading) and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), with the support of the Estate of Samuel Beckett. The BDMP (www.beckettarchive.org) digitally reunites the dispersed manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s works and facilitates their examination. The project consists of two parts:

a) a digital archive of Beckett’s a manuscripts, with facsimiles and transcriptions, organized in modules;

b) a series of print volumes, analyzing the genesis of Beckett’s works.