Editing Waiting for Godot (section)

=== Political ===
"It was seen as an [[allegory]] of the [[Cold War]]"<ref>[[Peter Hall (director)|Peter Hall]] in [http://samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/production_history.html ''The Guardian'', 4 January 2003] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070518185502/http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/production_history.html |date=18 May 2007 }}</ref> or of [[French Resistance]] to the Germans. Graham Hassell writes, "[T]he intrusion of Pozzo and Lucky [...] seems like nothing more than a [[metaphor]] for Ireland's view of mainland [[Great Britain|Britain]], where society has ever been blighted by a greedy [[ruling class|ruling élite]] keeping the working classes passive and ignorant by whatever means."<ref>Hassell, G., ''[http://www.picks.plus.com/howard/godotreview.htm What's On' London] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240521014351/http://www.picks.plus.com/howard/godotreview.htm |date=21 May 2024 }}'', 2 – 9 July 1997.</ref>

The play was written shortly after [[World War II]], during which [[Samuel Beckett#World War II and French Resistance|Beckett]] and his partner were forced to flee occupied Paris to avoid arrest, owing to their affiliation with the [[List of French Resistance museums and memorials|French Resistance.]] After the war, Beckett volunteered for the [[International Committee of the Red Cross|Red Cross]] in the French city [[Saint-Lô]], which had been almost completely destroyed during the [[D-Day (military term)|D-Day]] fighting. These experiences would have likely had a severe impact on both Beckett's personal politics, as well as his views on the prevailing policies that informed the period in which he found himself.<ref>{{cite news |last=McNally |first=Frank |date=5 June 2019 |title=Down but not out in Saint-Lô: Frank McNally on Samuel Beckett and the Irish Red Cross in postwar France |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/down-but-not-out-in-saint-l%C3%B4-frank-mcnally-on-samuel-beckett-and-the-irish-red-cross-in-postwar-france-1.3915861 |newspaper=The Irish Times |location= |access-date=1 July 2022 |archive-date=12 January 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210112070445/https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/down-but-not-out-in-saint-l%C3%B4-frank-mcnally-on-samuel-beckett-and-the-irish-red-cross-in-postwar-france-1.3915861 |url-status=live }}</ref> Some academics have theorized that ''Godot'' is set during World War II, with Estragon and Vladimir being two Jews waiting for Godot to smuggle them out of occupied France.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hirsch |first=Oliver |date=2020 |title=Beckett's Waiting for Godot : a historical play with two Jews as main characters |url=https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/sites/default/files/pdf/142606.pdf |journal=Brno Studies in English |volume=46 |issue=1 |pages=175–194 |doi=10.5817/bse2020-1-8 |issn=0524-6881|doi-access=free }}</ref>

Vladimir and Estragon are often played with Irish accents, as in the [[Beckett on Film#Waiting for Godot|Beckett on Film]] project. This, some feel, is an inevitable consequence of Beckett's rhythms and phraseology, but it is not stipulated in the text. At any rate, they are not of English stock: at one point early in the play, Estragon mocks the English pronunciation of "calm" and has fun with "the story of the Englishman in the brothel".<ref>Beckett 2008, p. 8.{{incomplete short citation|date=September 2020}}</ref>