Happy Days is a play in two acts, written by Samuel Beckett first performed in 1961.Beckett, S., The Grove Centenary Edition Vol. III: Dramatic Works (New York: Grove Press, 2006), pp. 279–307. Also: Beckett, S., The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 2006), pp. 135–168. Viewed positively by critics, it was named in The Independent as one of the 40 best plays of all time.
Winnie, buried to her waist, follows her daily routine and prattles to her husband, Willie, who is largely hidden and taciturn. Her frequent refrain is "Oh this is a happy day." Later, in Act II, she is buried up to her neck, but continues to talk and remember happier days.
Synopsis
Act I Winnie is embedded waist-deep in a low mound under blazing light, with a large black bag beside her. She is awakened by a piercing bell and begins her daily routine with a prayer. Talking incessantly to herself, she brushes her teeth, drinks the last of a bottle of tonic, and puts on her hat. She struggles to read the writing on the toothbrush. She awakens her husband Willie, who is hidden by the mound, and prattles to him. He occasionally responds with headlines from his newspaper, one of which reminds her of her first kiss. They both look at an apparently saucy postcard. Winnie explains that Willie's listening enables her to go on talking, and is delighted when he responds even briefly to one of her many questions. After Willie briefly doffs his cap, Winnie instructs him to return to his hole, which he laboriously does. After he is within she repeatedly asks if he can hear her at different volumes, to which he replies, with increasing exasperation, "yes!" Winnie attempts to discover if Willie can see her if she leans backward, but he does not respond. Winnie spots an 'emmet' (an archaic term for 'ant') carrying an egg. Willie comments "formication" (A sensation of ants creeping on the skin). Both of them laugh hysterically at the homophone. Winnie declares that she never thought she would hear Willie laugh again. She then asks if he finds her loveable. After some deliberation with herself, she pulls a revolver out of her bag, recalls how Willie asked her to take it away from him, and banishes it to the ground beside her. She begins to feel sad about her life, but shakes it off. She puts up a parasol to protect herself from the sun, and holds it over her head for a long time. When this becomes tiring, she discovers she cannot move to put it down. She begs Willie for assistance, but he is unresponsive. The parasol then abruptly catches fire, and she throws it away. Willie still unresponsive, she cajoles him to prove he is conscious, which he eventually does, by raising a finger. Winnie speaks of the difficulty of dealing with the relentless sun and remembers when she was not trapped in the earthen mound. She thinks about the future, and the existential threat of being buried deeper in the mound. She finds a music box in her bag, to the music of which Willie briefly sings (though he ignores Winnie's request for an encore). Winnie files her nails and remembers the last people who passed, a Mr. and Mrs. Shower (or perhaps Cooker), who asked what she was doing stuck in the ground. She prepares her bag for the night. Willie emerges and Winnie wishes that he would come round and live where she could see him better. He reads his newspaper. Winnie asks Willie about the nature of hogs, to which he replies "castrated male swine, raised for slaughter". Darkness overcomes the pair.
Act II Winnie is now embedded up to her neck, still wearing her hat, still with the bag and revolver beside her. She is awakened by the bell, which rings again each time she falls back asleep. She senses that Willie is looking at her but can no longer see him, and he does not respond to her calls. She continues to talk, examining her nose and recalling a time when a little girl called Mildred undressed her doll in the nursery at night, but is interrupted by anxiety about Willie and further memories of Mr. and Mrs. Shower. Willie crawls out from behind the mound, smartly dressed, which reminds her of the day he asked her to marry him. She encourages him as he tries to crawl up the mound towards her, and is delighted when he grunts "Win". She sings the music-box tune, a love song from The Merry Widow.
Characters
Winnie
Winnie is a "woman of about fifty", who passes her time between "the bell for waking and the bell for sleep" by following a very exact daily routine. In Act 1, after she methodically removes the items from her baga comb, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of patent medicine, lipstick, a nail file, a revolver and a music box. The routine is raised to the level of ceremony. Beckett's instructions to Billie Whitelaw in 1979 emphasize this:
The bag is all she has—look at it with affection … From the first you should know how she feels about it … When the bag is at the right height you peer in, see what things are there and then get them out. Peer, take, place. Peer, take, place. You peer more when you pick things up than when you put them down. Everything has its place.Fehsenfeld, M., "From the Perspective of an Actress/Critic: Ritual Patterns in Beckett’s Happy Days" in Burkman, K. H., (Ed.) Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London and Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), p. 53
At the end of the day she carefully collects her possessionsbar the gunand places them back in the bag. Winnie never plumbs (never dares plumb) the bottom ("The depths in particular, who knows what treasures"), so it is also her hope chest.
The items in her bag also have secondary functions, they serve as aides-mémoire. But more, like Krapp's tapes or Lucky's bones they provide her with what Mary Doll describes as "touchstones of existential meaning".Doll, M. A., "Walking and Rocking: Ritual Acts in Footfalls and Rockaby" in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) Make Sense Who May': Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p. 53 Winnie's perception of these objects connects her to the memories of specific days and important incidents within them.
Her possessions are all wearing out or running out. At the start of Act I she takes the last swig of her medicine before throwing away the bottle, her toothbrush has hardly any hairs left and the lipstick, to use Beckett's expression, is "visibly zu ende", the parasol is faded with a "mangy fringe" and even her pearl necklace is "more thread than pearls".Reading University Library MS 1396/4/10, pp. 80–83. Quoted in Pountney, R., Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett's Drama 1956–1976 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 185
Winnie is the eternal optimistRobert Brustein called her a "hopeful futilitarian"Robert Brustein in New Republic, 2 October 1961, p. 45. Reprinted in Graver, L. and Federman, R. (Eds) Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 258but the available sources of her optimism are being used up and she has to work harder and harder to keep up her positive front which is already wafer-thin when we first meet her. Her effortful optimism is expressed in her carefully precise, self-correcting refrain, "Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day. After all. So far."
Beckett described her as being "like a bird"Cohn, R., Back to Beckett (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 189 and she makes every effort to rise above her predicament but she keeps getting pulled down. She never questions or explains why she finds herself in the predicament she is in, but her dream is that she will "simply float up into the blue … And that perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull is so great, yes, crack all round me and let me out."
Willie
Willie is a man of "about sixty". In marked contrast to Winnie's loquacity, the henpecked Willie is laconic to a fault. In the whole of the second act Willie utters only one, barely audible monosyllabic word. Much of his dialogue consists of his quoting notices from his newspaper; his responses to Winniewhen he can be bothered to respond at allare terse and barely communicative. He functions mainly as something for her to talk atbeing used as a stooge by the old music hall pro that Winnie is"just to know that in theory you can hear me though in fact you don't is all I need."
He keeps himself out of Winnie's gaze, only occasionally surfacing from his tunnel. His only interest is to bury himself, figuratively, in a newspaper or erotic picture postcards, or literally, underground in his cave asleep and seemingly unaffected by the bell that jars Winnie.
There is a childlike, if not exactly innocent, quality to him and there are many times in the play one might think Winnie was talking to a young boy rather than a grown man. Winnie also serves as his protector, the custodian of "Brownie" the revolverBeckett is quite specific when he says revolver. He does not mean a Browning pistol. He is linking its name to a line by the poet Browning, "not because there is a weapon of that name. If the line was by another poet", he wrote, "the revolver wd. be called by the name of that other poet."Letter to Alan Schneider, 3 September 1961 in Harmon, M. (Ed.) No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 103 she keeps safe from him, lest he use it.
Whereas Beckett aligns Winnie with a bird, albeit one with oil on its feathers, he likens Willie to a "turtle",Martha Fehsenfeld in Ben-Zvi, L., (Ed.) Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 55 although many of the metaphors in the play associate him with pigs:
[I]n Act I Winnie speaks of envying "the brute beast" only a moment before Willie's "hairy forearm" appears above the mound; throughout the play Willie never rises to his feet, but crawls on all fours; and when Winnie notes that the bristles on her toothbrush are "pure ... hog's ... setae" Willie gives this comment a sexual dimension by revealing that a hog is a "Castrated male swine." In context, this phrase seems to relate to Willie, since various hints are made that he has been metaphorically emasculated by his domineering wife.Acheson, J., 'Beckett's Happy Days and Schopenhaurr' in Halio, J. L. and Siegel, B. (Eds) Comparative Literary Dimensions: Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman (University of Delaware Press, 2000), p. 95 n. 12
Origin
Beckett began the play on 8 October 1960Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 475 and the English version was completed on 14 May 1961.Lyons, C. R., Samuel Beckett, MacMillan Modern Dramatists (London: MacMillan Education, 1983), p. 116 Beckett finished the translation into French by November 1962 but amended the title. In a moment of inspiration, he borrowed the title Oh les beaux jours, from Verlaine's poem, "Colloque sentimental".Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 508
Cyril Cusack claimed that Happy Days was, by Beckett's own admission, "influenced" by Cusack's wife, Maureen Cusack's request that he "write a happy play" after Krapp's Last Tape."The Cusack stand", Magill magazine, December 1984, https://politico.ie/archive/cusack-stand
Beckett confided to Brenda Bruce what was going through his mind as he sat down to write the play: