SOURCE: Schumacher, Claude. “Jarry's Theatrical Ideas.” In Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, pp. 98-109. London, England: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1984.

In the following essay, Schumacher builds upon Jarry's own writings to articulate Jarry's ideas about the theater as represented by his plays.

Jarry is a subjective writer, who belongs in that stream of literary tradition which began in earnest with the Romantics. His personal obsession with a schoolmaster coincided with a whole attitude to life and became embodied in the Ubu fantasy. Jarry was essentially concerned with the expression of his personal ‘world within’. He was not solely, or even primarily, a man of the theatre, though he undoubtedly had a theatrical instinct of a highly individual kind. Nor was he, a priori, a theatrical reformer. He broke with naturalist theatrical conventions because such conventions could not possibly serve his personal vision. However, his ideas on the theatre have...