University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Jun 2015)
Philip Barry’s Here Come the Clowns and The Question of Theodicity
Abstract
Philip Barry is best remembered as a comedy writer, very successful on Broadway. While his serious plays often failed on stage, his comedies enjoyed great popularity among theatre goers. An Irish-American, he was a very religious Catholic and a man preoccupied with a spiritual search. Barry’s Here Come the Clowns (1938), a serious play with autobiographical overtones, focuses on the problem of free will and of human suffering in the world. It is a dramatization the biblical story of Job, as the protagonist is a man who has been inflicted with physical and emotional suffering. Now he wants to ask God ‘Why?’, because he cannot find any justification or explanation of his traumatic experiences. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the play responds to the problem of theodicy, a term which may be understood in two ways: as a justification of the existence of evil and suffering in the face of benevolent and powerful God on the one hand, and as an accusation of God who allows evil and suffering, on the other. The discussion is conducted in reference to a claim made by a German philosopher, Odo Marquard, that theodicy is possible only in modernity.
