Before Play, With Play, After Play: The Shaping of ‘formal integrity’ in the Early Drafts of Play

Abstract

The present essay argues that Beckett's concept of ‘formal integrity’, which he first articulated in his discussion of Film with the production team in 1964, was in fact shaped long before Film was on Beckett's writing desk. Rather, it emerged gradually during the early genesis of Play, the work that has often been associated with Film as the two were written around the same time and deal with similar themes. In order to make this point, the essay engages with the draft material in a recently discovered notebook that contains the earliest stage of the play's genesis – the manuscripts that were long considered lost and not recoverable. While paying due attention to the relevance to Play of the other works populating the notebook, the main focus lies on the development of what it terms Beckett's conceptual (rather than textual) writing style, which is a consequence of his quest for ‘formal integrity’. More specifically, the essay demonstrates that this ‘formal integrity’ goes beyond Beckett's extreme attention to Play's form (something that has been noted in literature), but hinges on correspondences between both formal and textual elements. In other words, it refers just as much to the content as it does to form, but content differently conceived as compared to his earlier plays.