Twelve Major Plays

August Strindberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351300988
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro

August Strindberg is one of the founders of the modern theater. George Bernard Shaw considered him "the only genuinely Shakespearian modern dramatist," Sean O'Casey called him "the greatest of them all." And to Eugene O'Neill he was "the greatest interpreter in the theater of the characteristic spiritual conflicts of our lives today." Twelve Major Plays includes the most famous and most characteristic Strindberg plays.This selection is particularly interesting in its depiction of the great range of Strindberg's moods and styles, from naturalism to expressionism, from ironic comedy to bitter tragedy. It displays his great gift for symbolic, mystical verse as well as his command of dramatic prose. In issues of sex and gender, Strindberg anticipated the modern temperament in society and drama alike.These translations gave American readers their first opportunity to know the true genius of Strindberg. Most previous versions in English had been based on existing German translations. Elizabeth Sprigge's unique achievement was to render the original Swedish texts into English that is at once fluent and accurate and that captures the full vigor and impact of the original plays.

The Dance of Death

A Drama in Two Parts

Foreword

After Crime and Crime Strindberg wrote a number of historical dramas in which Shakespeare’s influence is apparent. Then came Easter, his tender play of redemption, but even before his marriage to Harriet Bosse, the wheel had turned and Strindberg was once more plunged into icy gloom. Memories racked him and the old poisoned streams of hatred and suspicion demanded further violent expression. He decided to write a Dance Macabre, using Saint-Saëns’ music; then, finding that the hated Ibsen had forestalled him by introducing this music in John Gabriel Borkman, Strindberg took the march, Entry of the Boyars, as theme tune for his new play, called by turn Dance Macabre, Fight with Death, Death in the Dance, The Vampire, and finally The Dance of Death.

Strindberg was uncertain at first whether to make his leading character a pilot captain, a retired professor, or a doctor, but finally chose a superannuated Captain of Artillery, O.C. of an island fortress. In this grim stone tower, which had once been a prison, Strindberg concentrated his sense of life’s malevolence. Again, as in The Father, the theme of the play is married misery, and Edgar, the larger-than-life Captain, destroys the peace of all who are in contact with him, as he staggers from one death throe to the next.

The immediate model for Edgar was the son of a Swedish Battery Commander who had fought on the Danish side in the Prusso-Danish war of 1864; but the Captain in the Dance of Death is a highly composite character. Not only is he a caricature of a friend of Strindberg’s who, as a Customs, Inspector, became such an insufferable bully that in the end he had no one left to talk to, but also of several other of Strindberg’s former associates, whom he now regarded as enemies— and of course the character also contains a great deal of Strindberg himself. The Captain’s behaviour is in the highest degree extraordinary and his defence is Strindberg’s own:

Life is so strange. So against me, so

vindictive that I became vindictive too …

In Kurt, the Quarantine Officer, returned after fifteen years abroad, divorced and robbed of his children, Strindberg depicted another of his selves, sensuous, well-meaning, weak. Even the use of the telegraph apparatus in the play derives from Strindberg’s own experience, for he was once apprenticed to the telegraph service and learnt to send out weather reports.

Alice, the Captain’s wife, is painted with the venom that memories of his love-hatred for Siri von Essen, his first actress wife, always roused in Strindberg, yet in The Dance of Death he does not, in his usual way, lay the chief responsibility for the disastrous marriage on the woman. It is interesting to consider what may have been in Strindberg’s mind as he depicted this bizarre couple. We know that at some point he had discovered from his horoscope, cast at his request by a friend, that the hour of his birth was dominated by Saturn and Venus, the most incompatible of planets. He may well have had this planetary conflict in mind while he was creating Edgar and his wife, Alice, in whom the saturnine evil and rancour run parallel with an unresolved passion whose traces influence even their most desperate moments. Another influence in the depiction of this marriage “not made in heaven” may well have been Swedenborg’s De coelo et inferno, for at this period Strindberg was deeply affected by his work.

By and large, with its battering cynical dialogue, its silent nightmare action, and the pounding of the Entry of the Boyars, Part One of The Dance of Death is a masterpiece of horror, a caricature of tragedy.¹

In Part Two, Strindberg for the first time created adolescent characters. There are children in The Father and in Easter, but here in Judith and Allan, the Captain’s daughter and the Quarantine Officer’s son, are young adults in the turmoil of first love. It is probable that the fact that Strindberg had spent the summer of 1899 out in his beloved Baltic skerries, with several young nephews and nieces and one of his daughters by his first marriage, had something to do with this. While maintaining the horrific atmosphere of the play, these young characters are amusingly but tenderly drawn. As Judith’s mother, Alice, comments: “To think that flowers can grow out of filth!”

Part One of The Dance of Death, being in itself a full-length play, is usually presented alone, while Part Two, which is shorte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• The Father
• Miss Julie
• Creditors
• The Stronger
• The Bond
• Crime And Crime
• Easter
• The Dance of Death
• Swanwhite
• A Dream Play
• The Ghost Sonata
• The Great Highway