1 JOSÉ FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ ‘Minister of Horses’. Samuel Beckett according to Fernando Arrabal Samuel Beckett had a special admiration for playwright Fernando Arrabal. He held the Spaniard’s work in high esteem and did what he could to promote it. He also enjoyed his company a great deal. In an anecdote familiar to Beckett scholars, James Knowlson recounts that, long before writing his biography, he approached Beckett to inform him of his interest in conducting research into his work. Characteristically, Beckett told him that he should write about someone else. When Knowlson jokingly countered, ‘Well, you tell me, who is as good!’ Beckett did not hesitate in suggesting the names of Robert Pinget and Fernando Arrabal as writers who would justify his attention. 1 More evidence of the long-standing friendship between Beckett and Fernando Arrabal is provided by the 66 letters from the former to the latter between 1957 and 1988, a year before Beckett’s death. 2 However, despite the closeness between them, little is known about the details of their relationship. Arrabal’s writings on the man whom he called ‘Mon maître idolatré’ (in Van Hulle and Nixon, 2013, 81) have thus far not appeared in any work within the vast realm of Beckett studies. The aim of this essay is to analyse Arrabal’s comments on Samuel Beckett, as a means of broadening our understanding of the Irishman’s affinities with his own contemporary writers. The examination of this new material, drawn from a number of sources, is intended to complement other accounts of Beckett by those who were close to him. In this case, the writer Fernando Arrabal, whose literary production is itself highly original, sees Beckett in a humorous, childlike and absurdist vein, a