This chapter focuses on the influence of nineteenth-century neurology on Beckett’s writing, especially the work of Jean-Martin Charcot and Georges Gilles de la Tourette, who both worked at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Charcot’s famous Tuesday lectures, at which he exhibited his patients to admiring crowds, became an intellectual and middle-class pastime in Paris, instigating a new performance style in the Parisian café-concert, in cabaret, and in music hall, while the performers at such venues, in turn, became the stars of early cinema, adapting their convulsive performance style to silent film. Beckett took a lifelong interest in these popular forms, and the chapter considers the impact of their convulsive aesthetic on his work. It also addresses Beckett’s representation of speech and his reading of Bergson’s 1900 essay on Laughter, which argued that humour arises from ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’. Bergson’s extended essay was itself substantially influenced by medical discoveries, and especially the theatrical and often spectacular culture of the late-nineteenth-century science of neurology. While Beckett diverges from Bergson’s Cartesian stance, he nevertheless concurred on the limitations of free will and agency, on ‘the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter’, and on the human as always already determined by the mechanical.

This chapter considers the conceptual function of the echo as a metaphor for processes of intertextual dialogue and transformation. When thinking about the character that Shakespeare’s texts assume in Beckett’s works, instead of terms like adaptation, quotation or association, it is the notion of echo that aptly describes Beckett’s ways of engaging with his predecessor and materializing this engagement in the theatrical performance. This chapter regards the echo both as a principle of composition and an immanent figuration that is realized in the theatrical performance. Matter and materiality, stones and bones in Beckett’s works very often become a metonymy for the text itself in that they expose its opacity and resistance, and, at the same time, render it immortal as a kind of petrified lacuna. The chapter considers Beckett’s use of the materiality of stones and bones and reads Happy Days with Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline and Hamlet.