of

Samuel Beckett

To Honor and Announce
The Gift by Sir Joseph Gold
Of his World-Class Beckett Collection
To the University of Delaware Library

Performances by Billie Whitelaw and Pierre Chabert, and an inaugural lecture by Ruby Cohn headline the University of Delaware’s Celebration of Samuel Beckett, October 9-11, 2003 on the occasion of the University Library’s Exhibition of the Sir Joseph Gold collection of works by and about Samuel Beckett, donated in December 1999. Ms. Whitelaw will present the retrospective on her career with Samuel Beckett through commentary and performance that she staged to great acclaim at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1999. Mr. Chabert will perform La Dernière Bande, reviving the play which he performed under Beckett’s direction in 1975. Ms. Cohn will explore the Protean essence of Beckett’s artistic sensibility.

Reflecting the range and emphases of the Gold collection will be three panel sessions on criticism (Thomas Cousineau, S. E. Gontarski, and Enoch Brater), translation (Lois Oppenheim, Tom Bishop, and Jean-Michel Rabatè), and performance (Pierre Chabert, Xerxes Mehta, and Daniel Labeille). The co-editors of the Correspondence of Samuel Beckett, Lois Overbeck and Martha Fehsenfeld will provide the library lecture heralding the Gold Collection Exhibition per se.

Sir Joseph Gold’s eclectic collection of over 3,000 items is notable particularly for its representation of Beckett’s livres d’artistes, the fine press editions he produced in collaboration with visual artists, printers, and book designers, and also its numerous foreign language editions of Becket’s poetry, fiction, drama. Production materials (photographs, playbills and the like) from stagings of Beckett’s plays throughout the world are a unique feature of the collection.

The Celebration will run from the afternoon of October 9th through noon of October 11th. The events, funded in part by the Delaware Humanities Forum, the Delaware Division of the Arts, and the University of Delaware Library Associates are open to the public and free, with the exception of the Billie Whitelaw performance. A ten-dollar fee will be charged for this event. Please direct questions about the Celebration to the program coordinator, Professor Robert Bennett, by e-mail at rbennett@udel.edu or by mail c/o Department of English, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716.