Michiko Tsushima’s chapter discloses the relationship between trauma and skin in considering Watt as a ‘skin of words’ woven by Beckett—a psychic skin that he tried to rei—and, at the same time, as something that reveals the ‘force and truth’ of trauma. First, with the help of Didier Anzieu’s concept of ‘the Skin Ego’, Tsushima explores the possibility that Beckett’s act of writing Watt can be considered an attempt to rei the psychic skin by weaving a ‘skin of words’. This act of writing has a therapeutic aspect. She also argues that Watt explores the ‘force and truth’ of trauma which cannot be resolved or assimilated. Tsushima shows how the ‘force and truth’ of trauma manifests itself as a violence to the surface of language, a force that disrupts the apparatus of linguistic representation.

The Epilogue locates my research within my own experiences of being exposed to images of violence, contextualising this study and offering some thoughts on a personal experience of precarious spectatorship. I also discuss the work of Antonin Artaud, one of the key critical voices in theatre to warn against the violence of representation, and conclude with an analysis of Alice Birch’s (2018) La Maladie de la Mort, a play that addresses the suicidal consequences of a world predicated on images.

Shedding lights on biological episodes in Beckett’s writing, Julie Campbell in this chapter focuses specifically on the fear of diving that he experienced at six years old, which recurs from the early poem ‘For Future Reference’ to the later fiction Company, and analyses how and why it was traumatic for him. The incident, together with the shame and the sense of guilt he felt in mourning his father’s death, traumatised him. Beckett’s trauma, caused by his remorseful feeling that he had betrayed his father’s expectations, is perhaps most strongly reflected by the character Henry in Beckett’s radio play Embers. Henry is obsessed with the death of his father, who drowned at sea but whose body was not found. Henry denies his father’s death as if trying to expunge it from his memory. His distress, anger, bitterness, and confusion are expressed in his commands of his own actions and of the story of Bolton and Holloway. The radio listeners witness Henry’s inner feelings and share in his suffering.

One way forward with English literature in the period is to understand its relationship with the other vernacular literatures of western and central Europe and the colonies of the polities. Many English poets were aware of the politics and sociology of the continental poets, the contexts in which they wrote. Most of the poetry written by Andrew Marvell about the sea is his poetry about the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the three somewhat religious but mostly political and mercantile conflicts of 1651-54, 1664-67, and 1672-74. Not only is Marvell to be considered as a kind of poet in an international context, also his public poetry is part of an international and sometimes highly contested literary arena. To dignify vernacular English by imitating the best examples in antiquity and in Renaissance Italy was no longer the preoccupation for Marvell's generation, or a poet like Marvell, however much it remained a potent force.

The printed publication that Hickeringill refers to in the epigraph is The Rehearsal Transpros'd by Andrew Marvell, published in two parts in 1672 and 1673, which responded to several works by Samuel Parker. Marvell lacked full distance on the phenomenon of the public sphere because he wrote in the very process of its emergence into cultural consciousness. Parker's cynically confident deployment of figuration and accommodation is also a chief target of Marvell's critical intelligence. This intricately analogous interplay of terms - those of parody, figuration, and accommodation - gives Marvell a potent weapon for exposing Parker's arrogance that is absent from Buckingham's armoury. Marvell's sensitivity to the significance of print, which helps foster his consciousness of the public sphere, is to some degree an effect of Parker's sensitivity to it.

In this chapter, Mariko Hori Tanaka focuses on how Beckett responds to the imagined nuclear winter inherent in the global competition in the production of nuclear bombs and energy during the Cold War years. Many of his post-war plays including Endgame and Happy Days are clearly set in a post-apocalyptic world, where the only human survivors are the onstage characters. The earth uninhabited and the landscape of ruins with the last remaining human beings barely alive are suggested in many of Beckett’s works. Our post-holocaust world is filled with repeated disasters such as wars, conflicts, and natural disasters, so that we endlessly feel a sense of apocalypse. Beckett’s sense of men and women living in worsening conditions towards the unseen ending is the global anxiety shared in the late twentieth to the twenty-first century. Beckett’s imagination of dead victims ruined and suffering in some traumatic event (which he never clarifies) reminds us, the audience and the readers, of those who suffered and died in apocalyptic disasters. This chapter thus deals with the recent cultural traumas globally shared in our age.

Nicholas Johnson in this chapter discusses and analyses trauma of actors in performing Beckett’s plays. In the rehearsal process, many actors report traumatic symptoms such as panic, fear, anxiety, and nightmare, but it can be difficult to disentangle the overdetermined origins of these feelings: are they ingrained in the source material, individual to the actor’s process, specific to the performance context, or simply authentic physiological responses to the physical demands? Working through these questions first in terms of contemporary acting theory, Johnson introduces qualitative data from both experienced and early-career practitioners of Beckett. Alongside historical and theoretical explorations of acting, the chapter emphasises the concept of the ‘void’ as one possible key to navigating the potentially traumatic terrain within Beckett, as well as naming it as one of the tools at the actors’ disposal. By connecting to urgent contemporary debates in the medical humanities and positing Beckett as core to a unified theory of acting that takes account of the ‘cognitive turn’, Johnson’s focus on the materiality of these experiences extends a discussion beyond the fictive space of the texts and the biographical, currently the two most common approaches to Beckett and trauma.

Building on his detailed discussion of the impossibility of speech in Beckett’s work in relation to Agamben’s account of testimony in his book Samuel Beckett and Testimony, David Houston Jones turns in this chapter to the question of the face, which Agamben himself left undeveloped after his article ‘The Face’. Jones considers the face as a vector of the expressive capabilities of testimony. He discusses a range of dramatic and narrative situations in which the expressive capabilities of the face are pitted against the epistemological problem of testimony, from the deterritorialised face of Not I to the inexpressive face in Wattand the later prose. This analysis of the face in Beckett constitutes a unique critique of Agamben’s idea of testimony and contributes to a rethinking of trauma theory with reference to the realm of the visual.

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.

Chapter 4 appraises both the destruction of the exterior and the ‘empty centre’ that I theorize as hallmarks of emergencies, proposing a survey of some recent theatrical texts in which these ideas have been tackled. The intention here is to illustrate some ways in which theatre, with its partialities, contingencies and failures, can offer spaces of potential identification or resistance to this process. I begin with the concept of a ‘rigged game’. This idea, which underpins Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic, Ontroerend Goed’s £¥€$ (LIES) 2 Magpies’ Last Resort and Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical, offers a way of conceptualising through performance the restrictive limits imposed by emergency protocol. Addressing each in turn, I explore the ways in which they create theatrical languages to challenge the orthodoxies latent within emergencies and, importantly, destabilize the notion that ‘there is no other choice’. My second cluster of productions are Kieran Hurley’s Heads Up, Andy Duffy’s Crash and Mark Thomas’ The Red Shed, which are shows that borrow conventions from storytelling and dramatise the imperative of retaining a sense of historical context to the present moment, and the consequences of what can happen if this relationship is overwritten.