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Sylvia Plath's copy of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot

Sylvia Plath's copy of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (London, Faber and Faber, 1956) is another of the books from her personal library held by Smith College and open for research. Her copy was the second impression, February 1956. Her ownership inscription on the front free endpaper reads, "Sylvia Plath, 1956".

The play debuted in London at the Arts Theatre on 3 August 1955 and shortly thereafter transferred to the Criterion Theatre, which is where Plath saw in on 20 September 1955, mere hours after landing at Southampton earlier in the day. Her pocket calendar, held by the Lilly Library that likely no seconds were wasted in exploring her new city and country:

Breakfast at 7 on board the ship; photographed in a group by Evening Standard; customs; train to London (Waterloo); bus to Regents Park; attended speeches and teas; dinner with Carl Shakin, her "shipboard romance"; and then Waiting for Godot.

In her 25 September 1955 letter to her mother, Plath says, "We’ve seen a magnificent and peculiar existentialist play about a man’s dilemma in the midst of nothingness" (Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, 960). Two days later she ranked the play the "best" she had seen to Gordon Lameyer (964). In all she mentioned the play six times in her letters, per the index.

Another of Plath's pocket calendars indicates she saw Waiting for Godot a second time, in Cambridge, with Ted Hughes, on 31 May 1956. She commented that it was "flatter than London".

Below is a table of page numbers and the kinds of annotations that appear on each page respectively. There are not many annotations to her copy but it is clear she bought it very soon after it was published and read it carefully.


Page 
 Annotation type (underline, star, marginal line, text)
Ffep
Inscription by Sylvia Plath
42
Underlines
43
Underlines
44
Underlines
48
Underline
51
Underline
52
Underlines
53
Underline


All the books that we know Plath owned, read, used for papers, mentioned, etc. are catalogued on LibraryThing,.

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All links accessed 31 July 2019.
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