Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Early Williams
- 2 Entering The Glass Menagerie
- 3 A streetcar running fifty years
- 4 Camino Real
- 5 Writing in “A place of stone”
- 6 Before the Fall -and after
- 7 The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth
- 8 Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories
- 9 Creative rewriting
- 10 Seeking direction
- 11 Hollywood in crisis
- 12 Tennessee Williams
- 13 Words on Williams
- 14 The Strangest Kind of Romance
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Early Williams
- 2 Entering The Glass Menagerie
- 3 A streetcar running fifty years
- 4 Camino Real
- 5 Writing in “A place of stone”
- 6 Before the Fall -and after
- 7 The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth
- 8 Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories
- 9 Creative rewriting
- 10 Seeking direction
- 11 Hollywood in crisis
- 12 Tennessee Williams
- 13 Words on Williams
- 14 The Strangest Kind of Romance
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
If such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, and Clifford Odets dominate American theatre in the first half of the twentieth century, and Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard, and, among many others, David Mamet the second half, Tennessee Williams animates the middle years of the century. In a very real sense, then, Tennessee Williams inhabits a central place within the American theatre. The centrality of Williams's theatre, however, has less connection with chronology and more with the original nature of his theatrical imagination. While O'Neill was the tragic dramatist and Miller remains the theatrician of the ethical, Williams emerged as the poet of the heart. He took quite seriously Yeats's epigraph: “Be secret and exult.”
Ultimately Williams would become less secret about his life and art, and his exultations less clear of purpose, but he worked assiduously in creating poetic stage moments, moments in which social fact, psychological collapse, and eroticized encounter form a still point in which the imagination, itself, becomes the last refuge for his fated characters. In Williams's cosmology, of course, the imagination is the source of both great strength and weakness.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997