One of Brecht's favourite sayings was: 'The proof of the pudding is in the eating.' Although his essays, poems and plays tell us a great deal about both his aesthetics and his dramatic theories, it is to his practice (and to that of others engaged in performing his work) that we must turn for meaningful insight into Brechtian performance. The aim of this essay is to examine the implications of Brechtian theory and practice for the performer. This will be done by means of a brief discussion of Brecht's ideas on acting, followed by a fuller consideration of the views and experiences of actors who have played major roles in Brecht's plays.

Brecht was first and foremost a man of the theatre, a playwright who also directed, so that one might well suppose that without his sixteen years in exile, during which time the practice of his directorial skills was necessarily limited, the world would have received many fewer words about his dramatic theory. Certainly as a director Brecht seems to have referred very little even to the most famous of his theoretical ideas.

Written between 1941 and 1944 during Brecht's exile in the United States, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is made up of two stories, Grusha's, which starts in Scene 2, and Azdak's, which does not begin until Scene 5, the penultimate scene of the play. These two stories converge in Scene 6 where the problems that had been posed at the outset and highlighted throughout the sequences involving Grusha are resolved, thus bringing the whole action to a more or less 'happy' end. Since happy endings are not characteristic of Brecht's drama, this particular example of harmonious conclusion to anything but harmonious events (and to anything but a transparent argument) has prompted a number of commentators to draw special attention to the 'liberating, life-enhancing quality' of the play or its 'unified understanding'. The scholars who emphasise the joyful, morally affirmative and/or politically optimistic outlook provided by the play's denouement are usually also the ones who believe its two stories are organically linked. Their opinion runs counter to the authoritative view of John Willett and Ralph Manheim for whom the work is an 'awkward combination of two largely unrelated stories', despite which it is nevertheless 'a truly epic work embodying many of Brecht's special ideas, tastes, and talents'.

Bertolt Brecht anno 1928 (as encountered by Elias Canetti): the son of the provincial middle classes with the airs of a big-city proletarian, the enemy of capitalism transfixed by the best and worst of American culture, the pioneer of a revolutionary aesthetic who claimed he wrote only for money, the man who treated fast cars like women and women like cars, and yet contributed through his work to the movement for women's reproductive freedom. In his contradictory character, a character to a large extent self-created, Brecht epitomised the ambivalences of a Germany which, during his first thirty-five years, made the move from the provincial margins of European culture to become the capital of the twentieth century.

In a famous Brecht poem, the question is asked: 'Every ten years a great man. Who paid the bill?' (Poems, pp. 252-3). Curiously, the question is one that has never seriously been put in the case of Brecht himself. In the essay that follows, I will set forth some preliminary findings on a question that has received remarkably little attention in more than half a century of Brecht studies: who wrote what and what was the cost of that writing to others? Though a few scholars have identified various individual works as written by someone other than Brecht, no scholar has stepped back to ask, if many of the trees were planted by someone else, what of the Brecht forest remains? The question is a vast and inordinately complex one. I will limit my detailed observations to the contributions made by Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897-1973), and will only generally note the strikingly similar cases of Margarete Steffin (1908-41) and Ruth Berlau (1906-74).

Whilst it is easy to see where Beckett's discursive writing begins, it is difficult to see where, or how, it ends. It is possible to outline the loose assemblage of aesthetic theories and philosophical ideas that form their point of departure, but it is extremely difficult to see what happens to these ideas and where they end up. Beckett's two major early essays, 'Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce' (1929) and Proust (1931) are founded upon fairly coherent systems of philosophy and aesthetics. The rest of his pre-war discursive writing, which consists mainly of short literary reviews, can with care be unpicked to reveal developments of the same ideas. After the war, Beckett's critical attention switched to painting. Despite their highly stylized manner and ironic tone, his first two essays are in many respects logical extensions of his pre-war ideas, and they can readily be labelled 'discursive'. Yet these pieces represent the start of a deconstructive process whose logical conclusion is not to be found in recognizably discursive writing at all, but in dramatized dialogue and in the condensed lyricism of the temoignages and later prose.

That fierce endeavour to bring the intellectual and the emotional into focus which characterizes Beckett's work is reflected in his poetry as much as in his theatre and prose. The differences are partly generic, though to a lesser extent than might at first appear, and partly chronological. On the one hand, the generic continuum of preoccupation and manner means that not only must all of Beckett's writings be considered as directly relevant to the understanding of the poetry but also that all Beckett criticism is potentially so. On the other hand, the poetry was produced predominantly in the 1930s, with a further substantial foray in the late 1940s but only occasional ones thereafter, notably in the mid-1970s. Novels and drama made demands on Beckett's creative energies and relegated the forms of verse while simultaneously diverting the essential poetic thrust into other channels. In investigating Beckett's poems, the reader is drawn to explore the limits of poetry.

Beckett could hardly perhaps have more perfectly exemplified Malone's dictum - 'The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness' - than by choosing both French and English as expressive mediums, and then translating from one to the other. In so strikingly hybridized a context even to speak of 'the English fiction' runs the risk of seeming simply a convenient construct ill-adapted to what is in reality, if not a confused, then at least a potentially confusing state of affairs. But even Beckett's extraordinary writing career began with due deference to the compromise of composing in his mother tongue, so that for all practical purposes there is a kind of logic in reserving 'the English fiction' for the body of work he produced before turning forty. The work in question comprises three novels - Murphy', Watt, and Dream of fair to middling women (the last to surface but the first to be written); three stories - Assumption, A case in a thousand and Echo's bones (none of them strictly part of the corpus as Beckett came to conceive it); a book of prose fiction that is not quite a novel and not quite a collection of short stories - More pricks than kicks; and a scatter of non-fictional items more or less ancillary to his narrative enterprises.

Belacqua, in Beckett's first collection of stories. The throwaway remark, directed towards a briefly appearing Scottish nurse, seems at first glance unimportant. Yet it stands as a prophetic exclamation about the creature's creator, Beckett himself. It also marks the only time in more than sixty years of publication that the word 'bilingual' appears in his writing. The creature was bilingual, like Belacqua, who dreamed in French, and Beckett made them so. Bilingualism does much to distinguish this most distinct of artists. To have two tongues, two modes of speech, two ways of responding to the world, is to be necessarily outside the security of a unified single viewpoint. The more bilingual he became, the less he spoke or wrote of it openly; the less he drew attention to it, the more it shaped his mature vision. Far from being a mere curiosity, bilingualism works at the heart of Beckett's aesthetic activity, releasing waves of innovative energy decade after decade.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and his Hesperides have long been admired for their lyricism. After a century of relative neglect between the poet's death and the late eighteenth century, interest in Herrick was revived by John Nichols through the Gentleman's Magazine. Poems like 'To the Virgins, to make much of Time', 'Corinna's going a Maying', 'Delight in Disorder', 'To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses', 'How Roses came Red', and 'How Violets came Blue' made Herrick the darling of nineteenth-century anthologists; Algernon Charles Swinburne called him 'the greatest songwriter - as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist - ever born of English race'. The copy of Hesperides now in the Newberry Library (Chicago, Illinois) was once owned by a Mr William Combes of Henley, an amiable gentleman book collector who was said to carry Hesperides in his right-hand coat pocket and Izaak Walton's Complete Angler in his left whenever 'with tapering rod and trembling float, he enjoys his favourite diversion of angling on the banks of the Thames'. But the genteel songster of this pastoral vignette was not the only image of the poet to surface during the nineteenth century: at least one Herrick poem, 'To Daffodils', was appropriated by Chartist writers, who identified him as a poet 'for the People'.

The poets of early modern England, from Donne to Marvell, were deeply engaged and stimulated by the period's political antagonisms and rich diversity of religious experience. Indeed, in their age politics and religion were thoroughly interconnected: as Sir Francis Bacon observed, 'Matters of religion and the church . . . in these times are become so intermixed with considerations of estate.' Since the time of Henry VIII's Protestant Reformation, which rejected papal authority, the king of England had assumed the supreme headship of the English Church and thus governed both state and church: this was true for the Stuart kings of our literary period - James I (1603-25) and Charles I (1625-49) - whose absolutist power was reinforced by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As James I succinctly put it, 'No bishops, no king, no nobility'; and his son, Charles I, fully agreed, observing that in the kingdom 'religion is the only firm foundation of all power'. The purpose of this essay, however, is not only to explore the intimate connections between politics and religion as essential background for appreciating earlier seventeenth- century poetry: the aim is to highlight, using select examples from poems of the age, some of the ways its leading poets responded imaginatively to the political conflicts, ideologies, and religious currents of early-modern England up to the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Interregnum, when both the Stuart monarchy and Church of England were disrupted by revolution and Puritan opposition.

Although it is unarguably the case that governmental and other state structures have changed since the seventeenth century, sometimes it can be unthinkingly assumed that in another major site of power differences, that of gender roles, matters have remained largely the same. This has the result that whilst readings of Donne, or Vaughan, or Marvell might include an active consideration of the specifics of the status of Catholics in the early 1600s, or of the problematics of political alliances in the 1650s, it is still relatively common to find work on those same poets paying no heed to the particular contemporary limitations of femaleness and maleness. The result is a blurring of the specificity of the poetry and its concerns.

If the only evidence we had to go on when imagining the relationships between men and women in the seventeenth century was the most frequently anthologized male poetry of the period, we would gain a very distorted impression of the probable social realities. Whereas the legal and economic structures of seventeenth-century society ensured women's subordination to men, defending this through a panoply of ideological assertions, vast numbers of poems present the (would-be) mistress as all powerful, able to kill her admirer with an angry glance, her will irresistible.

One of the great achievements of modern literary studies has been the rediscovery of rhetoric. Thanks to the work of such scholars as E. R. Curtius, E. Faral, and B. Munteano we now know that rhetoric was a great formative influence on writers of all kinds from Virgil and Ovid to the generation of Goethe, Byron, and Stendhal. Although Romantic aesthetics programmatically rejected any external literary form in favour of spontaneous utterance, writers continued to use rhetoric, and its influence persisted well into this century. As a system teaching the art of composition and self-expression, rhetoric profoundly influenced poetry, drama, non-fictional prose works (history, philosophy, autobiography), religious poetry and prose (prayers, sermons). As the first fully developed aesthetic system it also affected ancient theories of art, and in the great period of its revival in early modern Europe, from 1400 to 1800, it was very influential in the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), and in both the composing and performing of music. For English literature its high point of influence was in the 150 years between the Elizabethan writers and the Augustans. A knowledge of rhetoric is indispensable to understanding not only the forms taken by literature in this period but also the motives behind composition, the writer's attitude to both his material and his readers.