The Various Texts of Tennessee Williams's Plays

Abstract

By now it should be no news that Tennessee Williams will present the textual editor of any definitive collection of his plays an enormous problem.' But after reading Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, a collection of essays by fifty-two critics edited by Jac Tharpe (Mississippi, U.P. 1977), and other recent articles, I conclude that far too few readers and viewers realize how many versions of many of Williams's plays exist. Of the forty-two plays he has published since 1941, twenty have appeared in differing versions; only three of his seventeen full-length published plays have not been revised at some point in print. Yet no adequate bibliography has ever appeared, and critical attention to the subject-save for that directed to the almost notorious cases of Battle of Angels/Orpheus Descending and the various third acts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-has been almost nil. Most commentators have simply accepted the New Directions texts of these three titles as the definitive texts. But the revisions published by Dramatists Play Service are often superior, and sometimes an earlier text published in a magazine still holds great interest and is, in at least one case, the superior version. following is a list of the various texts of Williams's plays which had been published by the end of 1977. I also list the titles of twelve plays which have been produced but not yet published and note the existence of unpublished versions of printed plays when such were used for a production. (Actually I am not sure that three plays of the 1930s were ever produced, but I have included them since Williams felt they were important to his development as a playwright.) Most of these unpublished manuscripts are among Williams's papers at the University of Texas Humanities Research Center, which also holds some seventy-six other unproduced and unpublished plays and fragments of plays. I have not listed Gavin Lambert's screenplay Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), based on Williams's novel, or Lanford Wilson's television play The Migrants (1974), based on an idea by Williams; but I have noted seven screenplays, an opera, and a ballet which have been based on his plays. When a short story version by Williams preceded the play, it is also listed, as well as the eight screenplays (two of them published)