The British Library’s digital archive reveals early objections to Samuel Beckett’s play alongside other records of classic works’ early lives
Today, Waiting for Godot is the most celebrated of Samuel Beckett’s plays, but newly digitised material from the depths of the British Library shows how its first audiences responded in horror to its “lavatory references”, while some anticipated that “this ugly little jet of marsh-gas” from “the late James Joyce’s secretary” would soon be forgotten.
The correspondence about Beckett’s play is among more than 100 items from the archives of 20th-century playwrights that have been digitised by the library as part of its free online resource, Discovering Literature. It sits alongside drafts, letters, notes and manuscripts from 13 other major dramatists, including John Osborne, JB Priestley, George Bernard Shaw and Harold Pinter. Aimed at students, teachers and the general public, the new additions to the online archive range from the manuscript of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey – which a 19-year-old Delaney sent to Joan Littlewood, asking her to read it “because no matter what sort of theatrical atrocity it might be it isn’t valueless as far as I’m concerned” – to Priestley’s letters from the trenches and Beckett’s production notebooks.
Related: Theatre of war: how the monarchy suppressed anti-Nazi drama in the 1930s
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