| Summary: | Alfred Jarry's revolutionary play, Ubu the King, has been a source of muse for various literary and theatrical movements including Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd for relatively a long time. The thematic and formal construction of this play owes much to the principles of the Theater of the Absurd. This paper follows two major steps. It first attempts to show the traces of Shakespeare in Ubu the King, and accordingly discusses Jarry's probable intentions of linking this play to those of Shakespeare. It then goes on to enlarge the facets of absurdity and grotesque in the play. This paper aims at illustrating the absurd elements in the play first by drawing some examples from the text, and secondly by elaborating on the social reaction toward the production of Ubu the King. In other words, if absurdity is the outcome of the confrontation of a rational being with a system that defies to provide any rational answer, it aims at answering the question of Jarry's position as one of the pioneers of absurd drama under the influence of William Shakespeare.
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