REVIEWS Enoch Brater, ed. Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 238. $18.95. As the tide implies, Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context is a critical volume organized in celebration of Samuel Beckett's eightieth birthday. The book's twelve essays, ably edited and introduced by Enoch Brater, are also offered specifically to students of Beckett's drama (not his fiction ), as Brater explains in his introduction: "The essayists . . . address themselves to some of the fundamental questions raised by Beckett's assumption of the dramatic mande. This collection links, through association , a distinguished group of well-known Beckett specialists with several critics who have not necessarily focused their attention on this subject before. The attempt has been to open up the field to a much wider range of response than that usually found in anthologies of Beckett criticism" (p. 6). While Brater's prefatory comments serve to define the various commendable aims of Beckett at 80, they also suggest what may be its only weakness. That is, by drawing on distinguished, familiar voices in Beckett criticism (and in the broader discussion of modern and contemporary drama), Brater has indeed shaped a superb text. But how likely is it that the "field" of Beckett criticism will be opened up (Brater's metaphor) by a volume which features "Beckett specialists"—Ruby Conn, Charles R. Lyons, Martin Esslin, Katharine Worth, and James Knowlson —whose previous work, to a considerable extent, constitutes tins "field"? To be sure, these scholars have enhanced significantly our understanding of dramatic and theatrical subjects other than Beckett, as have the other contributors to Beckett at 80: John Russell Brown, Normand Berlin, Michael Goldman, Andrew Kennedy, Keir Elam, die late Bernard Beckerman, and Thomas R. Whitaker. Still, even though these talented commentators make Beckett's birthday present one of considerable intellectual substance, readers might wonder, with some justification , about the gift's newness or uniqueness, about its commitment to radical re-readings of Beckett's drama. Nevertheless, as one might expect from its roster of contributors, Beckett at 80 contains a great deal to interest Beckett scholars. Especially provocative are the implicit "dialogues" between essayists concerning tiie influence Beckett has exerted on a new generation of playwrights, his obsession with the speaker-auditor relationship, language and silence in Beckett's distinctive style, and the capacity of Beckett's drama to motivate reconsiderations of the most fundamental components of dramatic form. Beckett at 80 acknowledges the importance of some "nagging" old questions and, at its best, both provides fresh answers to them and poses exciting questions of its own. The volume is structured in two parts. The first ("Retrospectives"), comprised of essays by Conn, Brown, and Berlin, evolves from each writer's initial experience of Waiting for Godot. Cohn traces the origins 290 Reviews291 of Godot, detailing its critical reception in Paris and outlining briefly Beckett's impact on Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Sam Shepard. In his "Beckett and the Art of the Nonplus," Brown continues the work of placing Beckett within a broader dramatic context, looking backward in time to Anton Chekhov and looking ahead to Beckett's influence on Pinter's The Caretaker (1960) and Old Times (1971) and David Mamet's The Woods (1977). Crucial to Brown's definition of the style of the nonplus are Beckett's "ability to stay with chosen elements until each has been tested to the point of destruction," his "fierce exactness," and his use of silence as a "necessary element of any individual's attempt to cope with an inner, uncertain self and with the disorder and the (sometimes more frightening) order which lie outside that self (pp. 31-32). Berlin's "The Tragic Pleasure of Waiting for Godof suspends momentarily the pattern of influence study in this section to place Godot in the tragic company of, among others, Oedipus Rex, King Lear, and Hamlet, arguing that Beckett "forces" his audience to take "a closer step to Didi and Gogo because their condition is our condition" (p. 62) . Berlin views Waiting for Godot as stemming from tragic, not comic, ground—a hypothesis which accounts for the play's creation of emotional engagement...