Strindberg Miss Julie

Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics)
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78001-426-5
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 90 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Drama Classi

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Bored with her sheltered existence, Miss Julie attempts to seduce the footman, but gets far more than she bargained for... August Strindberg's classic naturalistic play Miss Julie was written in 1888, and first performed at Strindberg's experimental theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1889, despite being banned by the censor. This English version, translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish, is published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series. The volume also includes Strindberg's Preface.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. His plays include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), To Damascus (1898), The Dance of Death (1900), A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1908).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Strindberg, August

Weitere Mitwirkende

Mcleish, Kenneth

Leseproben

STRINDBERG’S PREFACE

Strindberg’s Preface (1888)

The arts in general, and drama in particular, have long seemed to me to be a Biblia Pauperum, a picture Bible for people who can’t read. Dramatists are like preachers, putting contemporary ideas across in a form popular enough to let middle-class audiences (the mainstay of our theatres) understand what’s going on without too much brain-strain. Drama has always provided elementary education for children, the half-educated, women – anyone who still has the potential for self-deception or to be taken in, that is to accept illusion and the slant an author puts on things. Nowadays, therefore, when incoherent, fragmentary processes of thought, expressed in fantasy, are being replaced by scientific method (hypothesis, experiment and proof), it seems possible that drama, like religion, may be discarded as an activity whose time has passed, for whose appreciation we now lack the necessary conditioning.

This view is supported by the current crisis in European theatre, not least by the fact that in England and Germany, those countries which have produced the finest minds of our time, drama is as dead as all the other arts. Elsewhere, it’s true, writers have attempted to create a ‘new’ drama by using old forms to accommodate present-day ideas. Unfortunately the ideas are often so new that people have not had time to digest them, to find out what the real issues are, and clearheaded appreciation of the drama is drowned out – in a way which happens easily in the theatre – by clapping or hissing for one side of the argument or the other. New content bursts the old containers; it needs new forms to match it.

In Miss Julie I haven’t tried to do something completely new (for this is impossible), but simply to update the form to fit present-day demands. To do this I chose a theme – or it chose me – which is not of today only but timeless. Social politics (questions of rank, higher or lower; better or worse; man or woman) have and always will have deep fascination. I took the theme from real life – someone told me the story a year or two ago – and it seemed ideal for tragedy, since we still find tragedy in the suffering of someone who has been blessed by good fortune, and even more in the dying out of an ancient line. Will the day ever come, I wonder, when we are so advanced, so enlightened, that we take no interest in the brutal, cynical, heartless pageant that is human life? If so, we shall have shed those minor, unreliable thought-mechanisms we call feelings, which become dangerous and unnecessary as our reasoning faculty develops. If my heroine arouses sympathy, it’s because of weakness: we can’t help shuddering to think that her fate could happen to us as well. More sophisticated spectators might find this reaction insufficient, and those really up to the mark, intellectually speaking, might demand some resolution, some suggestion of how to cope with the problem, in short some philosophy. But it isn’t a philosophical problem: one family’s collapse is another’s good fortune, a chance to rise, and the balance between falling and rising, the fact that ‘luck’ is not absolute but comparative, is one of life’s main charms. And to those people of sensibility who’d like to change the awkward fact that hawks eat doves and lice eat hawks, all I can say is: Why should we change it? Life isn’t so unbalanced, mathematically speaking, that only the eating of small creatures by big creatures is allowed. A bee can kill a lion, or at least drive it crazy.

Many people find [the social implications of] my play depressing. But that’s their problem. When we’re strong, strong as the original French revolutionaries, we’ll be glad to see our forests cleared of the overshadowing, ancient trees which have so long blotted out the light from others with just as much right to flourish. It’ll be as much a relief as when someone dies after an incurable disease. People complained that my recent tragedy The Father was gloomy – but who wants cheerful tragedies? Everyone goes on about the joy of life, and theatre managers commission farces, as if the joy of life consisted entirely of acting the fool and depicting all human beings as daft or suffering from St Vitus’ Dance. For me, the joy of life is in its harsh, grim struggles; my pleasure is in learning, in being taught. That’s why I made this play unusual – unusual but instructive, exceptional but mould-breaking, and above all certain to annoy lovers of mediocrity.

What will annoy the simple-minded is, precisely, that neither my plot nor my point of view are simple. Real people – this may come as something of a revelation – do what they do for a variety of reasons, some more important than others; but the outsider tends to fix on just one, the one that best suits his or her own viewpoint. Someone commits suicide. ‘Business problems’, say business people. ‘Unhappy love-affair’, say women. ‘Terminal illness’, says the invalid. ‘Despair’, says the drowning man. But the suicide’s motives could be any or all of these, or a reason chosen at random to reflect more credit than the real motive might have done. I’ve provided all kinds of reasons for Miss Julie’s tragic end: her ‘bad’ mother; her father’s mistaken ideas on how to bring up a daughter; her own character; her lover’s influence on a weak and vacillating mind – not to mention the Midsummer festival, her father’s absence, her period, her devotion to her pets, the headiness of the dance, dusk, the aphrodisiac perfume of the flowers, the coincidence that brings her and Jean to the same room at the same time, the man’s urgent sexuality. For all that, I’ve avoided making the motivation exclusively physiological or psychological – it isn’t merely what her mother taught her, or the effect of her period, or inherent immorality. In fact, not having a priest to hand, I’ve avoided preaching altogether; the cook does that. I’m rather proud of this range of motivation – and if others have done this sort of thing before, I’m proud to share my contradictions (as people always call experiment).

To come to the characterisation. I’ve deliberately made my people quite characterless, for the following reasons. ‘Character’ is a word which keeps changing its meaning. It used to mean something like the main element in the mix which is each person’s individuality – and this was confused with temperament. Then the chattering classes began to use ‘character’ to describe someone who’d become a robot, fixed in or habituated to a particular rut in life. People whose psychological growth had stopped were ‘characters’; those who were still navigating life’s river, not with fixed sails but skilfully adapting to every change of wind, were characterless because they were hard to pin down, identify and so control. This bourgeois notion of character was then transferred to the theatre (where the bourgeois rule). A ‘character’ onstage came to mean someone whose personality was fixed and obvious: someone always drunk, or jolly, or gloomy, someone who could be written simply in terms of a club foot or a red nose or a catchphrase such as ‘Ooh, I say!’ or ‘Barkis is willin!’. This happens even in a great writer like Molière. Harpagon is no more than a miser, when he could have been, in addition, a financial genius, a caring father, a concerned citizen – and not only that, but his fault is vital to his daughter and son-in-law (who stand to inherit when he dies, and therefore humour him while he’s alive, even though it means they have to put off bed). I’m not interested in this kind of theatrical characterisation, in the way an author dooms each person to be stupid, coarse, jealous, stingy or whatever. The alternative approach is that of the Naturalists, who understand the richness of individuality, and realise that good qualities and bad qualities are each other’s mirror-image and are essentially the same.

My people are of today. They live in a world in transition, in turmoil. I’ve made them shifting, changing, vacillating, a blend of old and new – I’ve assumed, for example, that even domestic servants read the newspapers and have some idea of the ‘advanced’ notions of our time, so that in Jean inherited peasant thinking and the latest ideas stand side by side. [If it seems odd to make people in modern plays spout Darwinism, something Shakespeare had no need of, perhaps I could remind you that in Hamlet the Gravedigger talks about Bacon’s theory of forms, a philosophical issue as topical in its day as Darwinism is now. In any case, Darwinism is hardly a new theory: Moses invented a ladder of creation, from lower creatures up to ourselves. We’re just the first generation to put it in words and give it a name.]

My characters are drawn from a mixture of past and present ideas, snippets from books and newspapers, scraps of real people, rags and tags of Sunday best, all sewn together like every human soul. I’ve added a dash of evolution-theory, letting the weaker steal and repeat phrases from the stronger, letting them borrow ideas and suggestions from each other, [from the situation (the finch’s blood) and from the props (the razor); I’ve...