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''... but the clouds ...'' is a television play by Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote it between October–November 1976 “to replace a film of ''Play'' which the BBC had sent () for approval (and which he had rejected)”〔Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., (Eds.) ''The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett'', (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p 77〕 due to “the poor quality of the film”. Donald McWhinnie directed Billie Whitelaw and Ronald Pickup. It was first broadcast on 17 April 1977 as part of a programme of three Beckett plays entitled ‘Shades’ on BBC2. It was first published in ''Ends and Odds'' (Faber) 1977. An early title for the piece was ''Poetry only love''. ==Title== The title comes from a phrase from the last verse of Yeats’s near-solipsist poem, ''(The Tower )'': ::: Now shall I make my soul, ::: Compelling it to study ::: In a learned school ::: Till the wreck of body, ::: Slow decay of blood, ::: Testy delirium ::: Or dull decrepitude, ::: Or what worse evil come - ::: The death of friends, or death ::: Of every brilliant eye ::: That made a catch in the breath - ::: Seem but the clouds of the sky ::: When the horizon fades; ::: Or a bird's sleepy cry ::: Among the deepening shades. Several months after the McWhinnie production in which he was himself heavily involved, Beckett had the opportunity to act as his own director in the German version, ''Nur noch Gewölk'', for Süddeutscher Rundfunk. In this production he made one or two minor changes but the main one was to include the whole last stanza above rather than the four lines in the original. “''The Tower'' is a work which discusses history and the past not only in terms of recollection but also as an entire complex of traces, remainders and legacies of which individual subjective memory is only one element.”〔Katz, D., ‘Mirror Resembling Screens: Yeats, Beckett and ''... but the clouds ...''’ in ''The Savage Eye / L'Oeil Fauve : New Essays on Beckett's Television Plays'' (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA:Rodopi, 1995) (SBT; 4), p 83〕 “The painful, highly personal question raised by Yeats is: if the poet’s physical powers fail, if his vision and hearing are impaired, can the memory of the sensory world serve as a basis for poetry? Is memory alone capable of stimulating the creative act? … As he draws upon his memory, revisiting scenes both in his life and works, he comes to respond affirmatively to the pessimistic question first raised … The poet’s physical impairments, paradoxically, prove a blessing. Indeed, in the stanza from which Beckett derived his title, Yeats puts the real world in perspective, thereby reducing his own sense of loss.”〔Homan, S., ''Filming Beckett’s Television Plays: A Director’s Experience'' (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1992), pp 67,68〕 In a personal communication Beckett told Eoin O’Brien that this was one of Yeats’s greatest lines.〔O’Brien, E., ''The Beckett Country'' (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986), p 352 n 7〕 But why this particular line from the poem? Is it to do with the nature of clouds? “Clouds seem permanent but are ultimately impermanent; they cannot be touched, yet can be seen; they are nothing more than condensed water, yet remain a symbol of romance, of the imagination beyond practical measurement – they are, in a phrase, at once here and elsewhere.”〔Homan, S., ''Filming Beckett’s Television Plays: A Director’s Experience'' (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1992), p 77〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「... but the clouds ...」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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