A Study Of The Writing Of Humanness In The Plays Of Edward Bond

Edward Bond has formed a style of his own due to the extreme violence in his works. Bond’s theatre is violent in plot, tragic in nature and humanness-centered in theme. The present dissertation studies his idea of humanness and how it is developed in his plays. The dissertation first defines Bond’s concept of humanness as the qualities without which we are not truly human, and then divides his theatrical career into the Theatre of Reason and the Theatre of the Drama Event with The War Plays as the dividing line. On the basis of this division, a chronological close reading of ten representative plays investigates his different approaches to humanness in these two respective stages.Bond’s distinctive concept of human nature originates from his belief that human being is a community with a shared destiny. While the main philosophical schools of thought define human nature as the congenital quality of human beings, Bond views it as the social qualities without which we cannot be truly human, and which therefore involves such qualities as justice, altruism and responsibility. Their difference is actually the difference between "humanity" and "humanness". According to Bond, humanness can be both measured and created through drama.In the process of textual study, chapter three and four take Saved, Lear, Bingo, Early Morning as representative examples to argue the aim of Bond’s Theatre of Reason is to reveal the absence of humanness under capitalism. In chapter five and six, The War Plays and Chair Plays are examined to present "the choice between two equally undesirable alternatives" as the essential feature of Theatre of Drama Event and its purpose of exploring the possibility of recreating humanness. In these two series of plays, the Bondian heroes in dystopia sacrifice their lives for the value of justice, which reveal Bond’s persistent confidence in human justice and the possibility of "choosing to be human in a world where humanness is challenged".The dissertation concludes that Edward Bond does not belong either to the category of traditional British dramatists or to the mainstream dramatists of today, but stands apart with his own voice, which is characterized by the narration of violence. His early Theatre of Reason reveals the absence of humanness through readdressing the classics and history in the form of "problem plays". The later Theatre of the Drama Event recreates humanness in fictional stories filled with desperate struggles for life and justice in the form of "answer plays". His theatre seems to be "Bondian Horror-farce", but in fact keeps asking the question of "how to be human" in reality, history and the future. He has redefined the mission of drama and restored the correlation between drama and reality. His art is in fact a kind of aesthetic redemption of humanness.