Influences
The play certainly set out to shock and is a dramatic break from the French tradition of “well-made plays” and classical tragedy. The play sets out to mock, in the most offensive way imaginable at the time, the greed and corruption of late nineteenth century French bourgeois culture and even foreshadows the totalitarian abuses of the twentieth. In crafting Ubu Roi, Jarry borrows extensively from the Shakespeare plays that deal with seizing power and usurping established authority particularly the tragedies Macbeth andHamlet and the histories Julius Caesar and Richard III. As in Macbeth, Ubu, urged on by his wife, murders his benefactor taking his position to be defeated in turn by his victim’s son. We see the ghosts of ancestral kings as in Hamlet and he queen’s premonitions of the ruler pending death from Julius Caesar. There is the endless treachery of Richard IIIand even the bear from the Winter’s Tale.
Jarry’s turn toward Shakespeare was not just a fascination with English drama, but a repudiation of French classicism. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan dramas were wild, chaotic and endlessly varied. They included a haphazard mix of verse and prose. Kings and nobles shared the stage with farmers, craftsmen and drunks. Decades of history were condensed into a few short hours of stage time. Introspective monologues alternate with the massive carnage of on stage battle scenes.
Jarry uses absurdity, violence and excess to jar us out of our conventional habits and complacency, to help us break out of habit and laziness and see the world differently. But the extremity of argument seems to go beyond a narrow critique of Second Empire bourgeois society. In Ubu Roi we are faced with examples of totalitarianism and mass murder. The worst sins of the 20th century are catalogued in a single short play a decade before the century even began.