Albee Stoppard Literary Absurdity: Albee

Albee Stoppard Literary Absurdity: Albee and Stoppard Albee: The European movement toward absurdity recognized the explicit pain and irrationality the coincided to form the human experience. A sense of coping with meaninglessness would drive the work of writers such as Camus and Sartre. Across the Atlantic, playwrights such as Edward Albee applied this absurdity to a distinctly American sense of emptiness. So is this demonstrated in Albee's most prominetn work.

The loud melodrama of Edward Albee's famous 1962 play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, proceeds from this premise that human beings at their most combative, depraved and vulnerable may also be those at the height of an opportunity for revelation. From one perspective, this is an opportunity which lead character George seizes in a graduating series of personal incarnations that help to usher in resolution to what seems an insurmountable animus toward his wife, Martha.

But as they play out their horrific verbal fencing match in front of their party guests, George and Martha exacerbate the tensions in their failing relationship until they reach a mutual breaking point. And though throughout this emotional sparring there are severe twists in the game, ultimately there is a linear and logical fashion to the momentum of Albee's play, with George eventually determining the terminal direction, quite contrary to the submissiveness in his character as the audience or reader first encounters him.

This definable moment is woven into George's own remarks that "there are limits. I mean, a man can put up with only so much without he descends a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder, which is up your line. Now, I will hold your hand when it's dark and you're afraid of the boogeyman and I will tote your gin bottles out after midnight so no one can see but I will not light your cigarette. And that, as they say, is that. (Albee, 89).

In a sense, this demonstrates a man resisting the onslaught of submission caused by the absurd senselessness of life. Stoppard: In Shakespeare's eminently classic play, Hamlet, the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two of Hamlet's closest confidantes, is a glossed over detail of Shakespeare's play. In Tom Stoppard's 1966 theatre vehicle Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, this decision is countered by an inversion of Hamlet's perspective.

Placing the two after-noted characters at the center of his play, Stoppard offers an examination quite contrary to that of a man paralyzed by his conflicting passions. Instead, we find two highly actionable and yet passionless men. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard has fleshed out two men inevitably bound to their fates by the passions and wills of those around them, creating a compelling discussion on the balance between fate and free will.

Stoppard develops twin personas through whom the passive complacency of man is examined, with basic impulses of self-preservation, concession to authority and a willingness to be moved by the desires of others ruling idle lives inexorably approaching deaths which will be overlooked by all. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard creates two tragic figures that reflect the philosophical idleness of the average man, using their baseness, incomprehension and apathy to offer a critique of society.

Introduced in one of their frequent, pointless games, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately reveal themselves as internally contradictory figures. Clearly intended as comical figures in the spirit of Shakespeare's classic fools, the two Stoppard characters are yet capable of offering some of the most accurate statement's regarding their own circumstances.

Guildenstern makes the jocular and accusatory allegation to Rosencrantz that "at least we can still count on self-interest as a predictable factor." (Stoppard, 14) in this context, Guildenstern's remark is meant as a sarcastic observation of his friend's sideways logic regarding a frivolous coin-flipping wager. However, within the larger world of the play, this has an added level of significance. As.