Endgame and the Dialogue of King and Fool in the Monarchical Metadrama

Endgame and the Dialogue of King and Fool in the Monarchical Metadrama P. MERIVALE BECKETrS ENDGAME (1958). inheriting the dark stage "Spain" of Ghelderode 's Escurial (1927), and bequeathing an absurdist variant on King and Fool to Pinge!'s Arc/zi/ruc (1961) and Arraba!'s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (1967)', is the central example of a dramatic tradition perhaps as important as Godo!'s "vaudeville" to the modern stage. The dialogue of King and Fool, in a closed setting, with a minimal cast of characters, reflects, in a narrow sense, our contemporary preoccupation with the absurdist theme of playing theatrical games while waiting for death, and, more broadly, a metadramatic structure whereby those most essentially theatrical of all characters in Western theater, the King of tragedy and the Fool of comedy, are brought together to exemplify theatricality itself. In many other contemporary plays, similar figures appear in such a dialogue; the particular flavor of Endgame and these three analogues to it comes from the combination of the dialogue pattern with the more specific dramatic mythology of the cruelly decadent stage monarch and his Fool/ Victim, as found for instance in the Philip II of some Don Carlos dramas, and in the writings of Poe, Baudelaire and Wilde.' These dialogues take place in four claustrophobic kingdoms, almost spaceless and without time, kingdoms of the mind, or skull, expanded to the space and time of the stage: four echo-chambers of mythical history and dramatic tradition where the cries of ruler and ruled bounce off the prison walls of their reciprocal dependency. The 121 122 P. MERIVALE casts consist of four pairs of kings and fools - one of each per playthe minimum needed to carry on dialogue and to certify to innumerable varieties of human relation by means of the strict and familiar dialogue of King and Fool. "Handy-dandy! Which is the king, which is the fool?" The Shakespearean game of discovering which is which is continually re-enacted on the contemporary stage, and the game is still rounded out in Shakespearean terms: "Within the hollow crown/ That rounds the mortal temples of a king/ Keeps Death his Court, and there the Antic sits." Death is the ultimate Jester and the final Ruler, and our pairs of actors merely mimic his prerogatives for a time; the "play" or "playing" into which they appear to escape only emphasizes his steady approach; they are whiling away the time of waiting for death. The "closed fields" of metadrama finally shut off dizzying perspectives of inner duplication against the blank wall of death (as in Ghelderode and Pinget), or suggest the possibility of an eternal theatrical recurrence, of bringing down the curtain only to raise it and start the play again (as in Beckett and Arrabal). Ghelderode's Escuria/ is, not surprisingly, the most traditional of the four plays. Despite its strong affinities with the absurdist nevernever lands of Beckett and Pinget, its still stronger affinities with Arrabal's theater of ceremonial cruelty, and its perhaps coincidental exemplification of Artaud's dramaturgical principles, it does have a recognizable traditional plot of the "Don Carlos" type: a jealous King poisons his wife, traps his Fool into admitting his guilty love and then has him strangled. It also has a clear relationship to off-stage "reality": we are to take it that there is a kingdom outside the confines of the throne-room, that real events are taking place there, and that the major off-stage character, the Queen, did exist and did love the Fool, although none of these matters is quite as unambiguous as it would have been in, say, Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias or Le Rai s'amuse, or, more familiarly, Verdi's opera Rigo/ello, to which Escuria/, on the plot level, owes a good deal. Even so, almost all the stage action is "acting out," a game of psychological dominance through words, with throne, crown and scepter/ bauble as props for the enforced pretense of the exchange of roles. The exchange reveals significant psychological actualities: the King, we see, is really a "fool" whom his wife cannot love; the Fool, really a "king" in that he had...