[In the following essay, Jacobs discusses Strindberg's comedy and fantasy plays.]

In Tjänstekvinnans son, Strindberg dismisses Lycko-Pers resa, the sagospel (fairy-tale play) that had been his most popular theatre piece in Sweden, as ‘en anakronism och en konjunktur på samma gång’ (simultaneously an anachronism and a profitable enterprise—SS 19, p. 188). He seems always to have undervalued this work and to have been somewhat embarrassed by its success. In Tal till svenska nationen, he claims that because it lacks both artistic form and living characters, it is far inferior to Oehlenschläger's Aladdin, the work that inspired it (SV 68, p. 100). Therefore when Bernard Shaw tried that same year to persuade him to let Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree produce Lycko-Pers resa at His Majesty's Theatre in London, Strindberg rejected the proposal out of hand. In his initial letter, Shaw explained that ever since 1904, when J. M. Barrie had made a stunning success with Peter Pan, every London manager's dream had been to find another play like it—for want of a more precise generic designation in English Shaw describes it as ‘a sort of fairy-play for children’. In 1909 Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird had been acclaimed by the British public; now, Shaw implied, the pragmatic bourgeoisie of London had not only acquired a taste for make-believe, but also possessed a degree of generic recognition that would enable them to take Lycko-Per to their hearts. He apologized for this mild sort of pioneering by intimating that the production of Strindberg's A Midsummer Night's Dream would make the London public intensely eager to see his Hamlet.¹ Strindberg, who had by no means abandoned this rather frivolous genre, countered with the last of four fairy-tale plays that he had written since his Inferno crisis: a ‘lyrical fantasy’ entitled Svarta handsken, which to this day has never enjoyed much success, except as a radio play.² His continued interest in the sagospel and his tendency to overvalue plays like Svarta handsken raise some interesting questions about his later use of genre.

Genre, as Alastair Fowler observes, is ‘a communication system, for the use of writers in writing, and readers in interpreting.’³ Strindberg's use of generic and modal designations—and even of the more or less interchangeable words genre and form—often sends confusing messages to his readers. Such is the case with Gillets hemlighet and Brott och brott which he called comedies, with Fordringsägare, which he called a tragicomedy, and with Advent, which he called a mystery play (ett mysterium). ‘Hjärnornas kamp’ (The Battle of the Brains), the title of a short story he wrote in 1887, refers to a concept of conflict largely based on Hippolyte Bernheim's findings about psychic suggestion in the waking state that became the dominant theme of the works he wrote during the late 1880s. In January 1887 he proudly proclaimed that he had invented a new genre, ‘hjärnornas kamp’. ‘Denna genre (Edgar Poe),’ he wrote to his publisher in 1888, ‘blir de närmaste tio årens, och började med Bourget fortsättande i Maupassants Pierre et Jean, implanterades hos oss med Rosmersholm och Fadren’ (This genre (Edgar Poe) will dominate the next decade, and began with Bourget, continuing in Maupassant's Pierre et Jean, was implanted here [in Scandinavia] by Rosmersholm and The Father'—VII, p. 212). This instructive misuse of the word genre shows how Strindberg conceived of the relation between theme and form. Years later (in Öppna brev till Intima teatern) he clarified this relationship in the famous dictum: ‘Ingen bestämd form skall binda författaren, ty motivet betingar formen’ (No predetermined form is to limit the author, because the theme (or motif) determines the form—SS 50, p. 12). Using ‘form’ here in its widely-accepted meaning of genre (or kind), he appears to be saying two things about the relationship between form and content: not only does literature—like genre painting—make its appeal primarily through content, but the content will determine the structure of the plot and the mode of the work.

In 1899—after his Inferno crisis had culminated in his conversion to a portmanteau belief in ‘unseen’, corrective powers—Strindberg invented yet another genre (in his sense of the word), that is to say, a literary form based on the theme he called ‘Nemesis Providentia’ in the notes he kept while Advent was beginning to take shape in his mind.⁴ This genre, which one might call ‘the nemesis play’, achieves roughly the same prominence in his post-Inferno production as ‘The Battle of the Brains’ does in the naturalistic works he wrote during the late 1880s. The plot structure determined by the nemesis theme (the content) can be accommodated by various literary kinds: the Strindbergian ‘commedia’ (Brott och brott),⁵ the historical play (Carl XII), and the sagospel (Advent). But the true progenitor of the nemesis play would appear to be the sagospel.

Shaw's uncertainty about the proper generic designation for Peter Pan—‘a sort of fairy-play for children’—points to some of the problems one encounters in trying to define (and confine) the rather nebulous sagospel—what is called Märchendrama (or Zauberstück) in German, féerie in French, and fairy-tale play (or extravaganza) in English. Much as these national variants may differ from each other in emphasis, they are all based on fairy-tale, mythic, or biblical motifs. They usually depict a world in which the laws of time, space, and causality are suspended and where personifications of supernatural beings (gods, spirits, fairies, wizards, and the like) freely interfere in human affairs. Though works by Aristophanes (The Birds) and Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest) may be regarded as the antecedents of this literary kind, the immediate ancestors of the romantic sagospel are Carlo Gozzi (Fiabe dramatiche), Schikaneder (Die Zauberflöte), Goethe (Faust), and Tieck (Der gestiefelte Kater).⁶ In stories and plays representing the interpenetration of the natural and the supernatural worlds, several Scandinavian writers produced some of their masterpieces: H. C. Andersen's collections of Eventyr (Fairy Tales), Oehlenschläger's Aladdin (1805), Atterbom's Lycksalighetens ö (The Isle of Bliss, 1824-7), and Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1867)—all of which helped inspire Lycko-Pers resa.

Somewhat surprisingly, Zola valued the féerie very highly, despite its contempt for le vrai—or rather because of it. For him, the charm of this fanciful genre is that it lets us escape briefly from earth and takes us into the world of the impossible.⁷ The young naturalist Strindberg, on the other hand, clearly felt uncomfortable in the realm of fantasy at this point in his career; yet in 1882, when he got a commission to write a Christmas entertainment, he did not hesitate to employ an elf (tomte), a good fairy, a wishing ring, talking rats, a dancing broom, and other sagospel conventions to tell the story of Lucky Peter, who has all the characteristics of the typical fairy-tale hero: compassion, humility, and naïveté. The poor lad is cruelly treated by his cynical, misanthropic father, a Swedish Scrooge, whose heart has been hardened not by materialism, but by matrimony. To spare his hapless son from the same fate, he has sequestered him in a church for the first fifteen years of his life. But the spirit of Peter's deceased mother is still very much alive as the protecting, loving fairy godmother who liberates him from his father and sends him out into the world to discover what life is really like and to become ‘en människa och en mänsklig människa’ (a human and a humane human—SS 9, p. 282).

Whereas the path of the fairy-tale hero generally begins in a drab world of everyday reality and moves through a magical realm in order to emerge in a shining new reality, Strindberg reverses this pattern.⁸ Departing from a world where rats go into mourning for their lost babies, where a mysterious voice reprimands blasphemy, and where the picture of the madonna nods and speaks, Peter moves out into a more or less recognizable distortion of everyday reality. His mission is not only to search for lycka (‘happiness’, ‘good fortune’, or ‘success’), but to divest that word of its ambiguities and to find its one essential meaning. To help him satisfy his hunger for life and happiness, the elf has provided him with a wishing ring; to help instruct him in the vanity of human wishes, his fairy godmother has given him a female companion, Lisa, a human avatar of herself. For most of the play Lisa remains a supernatural shape-shifter who regularly shows up to rescue him from serious difficulties and to see that he has learned his lesson; but she cannot really become a source of lycka herself until Peter overcomes his self-love.

The play ends, as it began, in a church where the fairy-tale realm is reestablished: a broom dances and religious statues speak. Peter sees his own shadow (skugga) from whom he learns that it is our failings, not our virtues, that make us human, and that self-knowledge is the only road to real manhood. As a result of his experience of the interpenetration of invisible, supernatural world with the visible world of everyday reality Peter has finally matured to the point at which he can renounce his youthful dreams. When the sexton (Peter's transfigured father) comes to expel Peter and Lisa from the church—from Paradise, Lisa says (SS 9, p. 380)—Peter realizes that the enchantment is broken and that they can now take paradise with them. From windows in the church the elf and the fairy godmother watch as the three now fully-human characters reenter the world divested of their dreams and their illusions.

The lasting technical lesson Strindberg learned from this first experiment with the sagospel derives from the stage practice of another of his mentors in this genre, the Viennese actor-playwright Ferdinand Raimund, who had made brilliant use of the changement à vue (i.e., change of scene without lowering the curtain). This theatrical convention lies well within the reader-spectator's horizon of expectations because the generic paradigm prepares us for the rapid alternation between the two interpenetrating worlds of the sagospel. Strindberg experimented with this technique in Lycko-Pers resa and later used it with startling effect in the changed context of such post-Inferno works as Till Damaskus, Ett drömspel, and Stora landsvägen. The real trouble with Lycko-Pers resa—and surely this is what embarrassed Strindberg about it—is that it deals with the interpenetration of two unreal worlds. In fact, it is easier to accept the talking rats and the wishing ring than it is to believe in Peter and his embittered father as human characters. With Himmelrikets nycklar in 1892 Strindberg made an unsuccessful attempt to resurrect this genre, but before he would be ready to reshape the sagospel, his world view would have to change.

‘Genres survive,’ as Harry Levin observes, ‘by meeting the conditions that reshape them.’⁹ The conditions that reshaped Strindberg's whole outlook on life arose during his Inferno crisis. Strindberg's efforts in youth and early manhood had been to liberate himself first from Pietism (his legacy from his mother), then to reject the ethically-based Unitarianism he had gained from reading Theodore Parker, and finally—in the late 1880s—to espouse a form of nihilistic humanism. This final view, which attempts to reconcile determinism with ethics, is perhaps best expressed by Gustaf in Fordringsägare. Arguing that everything happens by necessity, his unfaithful former wife, Tekla, declares herself innocent of any form of wrong-doing in her marriages. ‘Oskyldig,’ he replies, ‘inför honom som icke finns mer; ansvarig inför sig själv och inför sina medmänniskor’ (Innocent in the eyes of Him who no longer exists; responsible in one's own eyes and in the eyes of one's fellow man—SV 27, p. 270). The moralistic outlook that began to emerge in Strindberg's conscious mind during the last phase of the ‘Inferno crisis’ forced him to link his inescapable guilt feelings with past misdeeds. When he was at last able to find a connection between suffering and guilt, his anxiety was transformed into remorse.¹⁰ This new sense of guilt and remorse eventually led Strindberg to conclude with Maurice, the hero of Brott och brott, that we are guilty of ‘thought crimes’, even when we are not responsible for committing them.

The Inferno crisis began as a period of intense, apparently innocent suffering for Strindberg. During its early stages he resorted to ideas of metempsychosis, Doppelgänger, or life as a penal colony in order to explain his own meaningless suffering. In 1896 he began to keep an ‘occult’ diary. This document—part intimate diary, part dreambook, part scrapbook full of Bible quotations, alchemical formulas, and curious facts gleaned from the newspapers—was an attempt to reduce the world to a text that could be read backwards and forwards in order to show purpose, meaning, and causality (or at least probable causality) in the world. On the first page of Ockulta dagboken he copied down a dictum from the Talmud: ‘Om du vill lära känna det osynliga, då iakttag med öppen blick det synliga’ (If you want to learn about the invisible [world], scrutinize the visible [one] with care). This phrase clearly indicates why Strindberg spent so many years (1896-1908) recording and collating his observations of the visible world in this diary: his study of the ‘world text’ he produced convinced him that the visible world really is interpenetrated by an invisible one peopled with good and evil spirits.¹¹

During the Inferno years Strindberg devoted himself to alchemical experiments and became involved with the Paris Occultists (Eliphas Lévi, Stanislas de Guaita, and Dr Papus), who opposed oriental (theosophical) mysticism with a brand of Western occultism based on the hermetic tradition stemming from Paracelsus and Saint-Martin. He also read some of Swedenborg's neo-platonic theological works, as well as Balzac's Swedenborgian novels, Séraphîta and Louis Lambert. As Swedenborg had done during the crisis that led to his religious conversion, Strindberg began to keep a record of his dreams. Moreover, he developed a strong interest in mystical dramatic works like Maeterlinck's L'Intruse and the works of Sâr Péladan. As a reader, he was very like a post-structuralist in that he tended to produce meanings that often had little to do with the intentions of the authors he read. As a diarist, he was a structuralist, hoping to lay bare the systems that underlay his chaotic life. All of his ‘occult’ interests point in the same direction: he was looking for the hidden narrative, the masterplot for his own life. What he found was a new kind of masterplot for ‘nemesis plays’, plays about a familiar, visible world in which the manifestations of the invisible world have a terrifying reality.

This masterplot is certainly evident in the first two parts of the Till Damaskus trilogy (1898) the so-called ‘vandringsdramer’ (sometimes called ‘station plays’ or ‘quest plays’ in English) that signalled his return to literature.¹² In the next two plays, Advent and Brott och brott, one sees a change of direction. That these two plays (in quite different styles) were published together in one volume in 1899 with the overall title Vid högre rätt (In a Higher Court) points to their thematic similarity. Both plays deal with a man and woman who are unwilling (or unable) to confront their own culpability until they have gone through a hellish series of torments; both works begin in a place of burial and end when the erring characters genuinely repent for their sins and have some grounds for hope of salvation.

When he wrote these two plays, Strindberg was in the process of inventing a new genre (in his sense of the word), but he hardly knew what to call it. ‘Mitt lif är sig likt,’ he wrote to a friend on 10 November 1898, ‘kryper, dag efter dag, i arbete och stundom får jag tankar med skön drägt. Skrifver en sagospelstragedi utan fé och tomte; endast de store outgrundlige Osynlige drifva sitt spel’ (My life is the same as usual, creeps along, day by day, with work and at times my thoughts come to me beautifully dressed. Am writing a ‘fairy-tale tragedy’ without either good fairy or elf; only the great, inscrutable Invisible Powers are abroad—XIII, p. 35). In the manuscripts of the play he variously designated this work as ‘Advent, En Barnpjes’, ‘Mausolén. Mysterium’, and ‘Advent. Ett mysterium’ (‘Advent, a Children's Play’, ‘The Mausoleum. A Mystery Play’, and ‘Advent. A Mystery Play’). In one letter (XIII, p. 50) he referred to it as his ‘nya Swedenborgsdrama (Ett Mysterium) som blir en sagospelstragedi med mystik’ (new Swedenborgian drama [a Mystery Play] that will be a fairy-tale tragedy with mysticism). In another (XIII, p. 54) he called it ‘mitt Mysterium eller religiösa Sagospel’ (my Mystery Play or religious Fairy-Tale Play).¹³ On 19 December he noted simply in Ockulta dagboken, ‘slutade “Advent”, sagospelet’ (finished “Advent”, the fairy-tale play). These Polonian combinations of generic and modal terms point to a combined genre.

Near the end of the ‘Inferno crisis’ Strindberg found comfort in some of the visionary works of Swedenborg, who was keenly aware of a dynamic tension between the visible world of human affairs and an invisible world of corrective spirits. Like Den Andra (The Other) in Advent, these Swedenborgian spirits are charged with the vastation and regeneration of erring man.¹⁴ But if Swedenborg provided a good deal of the content in this new ‘genre’ of Strindberg's, two other writers gave him the literary matrix that helped him find suitable forms. Before starting Advent he had immersed himself in the novels of H. C. Andersen; later, while working on Brott och brott he became obsessed with the ‘occult’ tales of Rudyard Kipling. The conflict between imagination and reality is a major theme in Andersen's novels and the poetic atmosphere in which he develops this theme doubtless explains their immense appeal to Strindberg after the Inferno crisis. In a letter to his children in Finland (XIII, p. 59), Strindberg called attention to Andersen's influence on Advent. Kipling made an even more profound impression on Strindberg. In early February 1899 he wrote to a friend that [Kipling] ‘är ju ett fullt uttryck af nutid. Han är “halfgalen” och alla hans hjeltar äro “galna”. … Men Kipling är ockult, d. ä. tror på anden hos menniskan och rör lätt vid de Infernoproblem jag lagt ramarne på’ (is indeed the complete expression of the moment. He is ‘half-crazy’ and all of his heroes are ‘crazy’ … But Kipling is occult, that is, he believes that man has a soul and [he] touches lightly upon the problems I got my paws onto in Inferno—XIII, p. 86). A few days later, he wrote to another friend (XIII, p. 92) that Kipling had dredged up all of the mysticism that was lurking in the depths of Strindberg's own being. In other words, reading volume after volume of Kipling's realistically presented stories, in which stolid, pragmatic English colonials are profoundly changed by their brushes with ghosts, gurus, or mysterious Indian divinities, helped corroborate Strindberg's passionate belief that unseen powers are guiding us toward peace in the Hereafter.

Writing about Lucky Peter's quest for self-discovery, as Strindberg said in a letter to Helena Nyblom (II, p. 363), was like playing hooky from the grim school of life. While writing Advent, on the other hand, he actually lived through some of the same mysterious and disquieting experiences that plague the wicked characters in that play.¹⁵ Like Strindberg, these two characters, the Judge (Lagmannen) and his Wife (Lagmanskan, the wicked step-mother of the piece), are tormented by a dancing sunbeam (solkatt). In order to perpetuate their relations to the familiar elements of their earthly life, they have built themselves a mausoleum in the midst of their vineyard. Unwittingly, however, they have constructed this monument to their own goodness on what was formerly a place of execution. The newly-completed structure, intended to perpetuate their false, self-serving image of themselves, actually houses the ghosts of all the people who have suffered and died because of their evil. In this modified sagospel, familiar fairy-tale motifs are reshaped by being placed in a Swedenborgian context of protective and corrective spirits. Amalia and Adolf, the Judge's daughter and son-in-law, have been deeply wronged: Amalia has been reduced to the status of a servant, while Adolf has been cast out of the family circle altogether. Their innocent children, Erik and Thyra, whom the Judge's Wife has locked in the cellar, are protected by a mysterious, supernatural Playmate, who turns out to be the Christ Child. In this fairy-tale, moreover, it is the ogres, not their victims, who are sent out upon a quest of self-discovery.

The most startling transformation in this play, however, has little to do with the Swedenborgian context. It is the contrast between what the characters see and what is truly to be seen. When the curtain rises we see both the visible and the invisible worlds. Though we see the set as they see it (a vineyard, the new mausoleum, a peach tree), the Judge and the Wife look very different to us than they do to each other and to themselves: his costume, dating from the 1820s, links him with his double, the Unjust Judge, who was once executed on the spot where the mausoleum now stands; the Wife (with her kerchief, cane, glasses, and snuffbox) is identical with her double, the Witch, whose ballgown she later borrows. As if we were looking at X-rays of the Judge and the Wife, we see their inner corruption; looking at extremely flattering, retouched photographs of themselves (and each other), they see a Swedish Philemon and Baucis whom we can barely imagine.

The Judge and his wife feel that they have led exemplary lives. He attributes his incredible prosperity to the fact that he was born with a cowl (segerhuva). Though both husband and wife greatly fear the heat and light of the sun, the Judge uses sunshine to figure forth their serenity: ‘Livets afton,’ he observes to his wife, ‘har slutligen skänkt oss det solsken som dess morgon lovade’ (The evening of life has finally given us the sunshine its morning promised—p. 15). Basking in this metaphorical sunlight, the old couple can almost forgive their envious neighbours and their ungrateful children. The dancing sunbeam (en solkatt, literally a ‘sun-cat’) that suddenly shimmers on the wall of the mausoleum seems to the Wife to be a good omen: ‘Det betyder att vi skola se solen lysa ännu en lång tid,’ she says (That means we shall see the sun shining for a long time to come—p. 18). Following a familiar Strindbergian pattern, however, events in the rest of the scene soon make it clear that they have misread the omens. The Judge has illusions of probity, the Wife delusions of pulcritude. The vineyard was not, as the Judge has always believed, once a battlefield, but a place of execution; the new mausoleum stands where the gallows once stood. Though each is still blind to his own faults, by the end of the first scene the dancing sunbeam has become a searing spotlight: the Judge now sees the Wife for the witch she is; his shameful, criminal nature is now fully revealed to her.

The prosperity of the Judge and the Wife is built on a career of misdeeds that has caused untold suffering to others. The Judge has robbed or cheated the living: he has misappropriated a silver coffee service from a poor family and stolen the legacy of an orphan whom he has apprenticed to a chimney sweep. The Wife has plundered the dead: she has stolen the money intended for funeral wreaths for her mother; from her step-daughter, Amalia, she has stolen the memory of her real mother. By substituting a monstrance of silver-gilt for the pure gold one she promised to the church, she has even cheated God. The mausoleum they have built in order to enshrine themselves really houses Death, a Fool mocking the Judge's cowl, the shades of all of the people who have suffered at the hands of the Judge and the Wife, as well as the ghost of the Judge's double, the Unjust Judge. The structure is, in other words, a metaphor for the hidden, inner lives of these two sinners: not a tribute to their goodness, but a barrier to their salvation. Near the end of the play this monument becomes (in the peep show the Judge squints into in Hell) a place of excrement. No hope of forgiveness is possible until it is destroyed.

The Judge and the Wife both have ghostly doubles whose physical defects correspond to the moral defects of their human counterparts: the Hanged Judge has a rope around his neck and is missing an index finger, because he once swore falsely on the Bible; the Wife encounters avatars of herself in her deceased bother, the hunchbacked Prince, whose deformity is obvious to everyone but himself, and in the Witch, who drives her out to wander alone until she freezes to death. The Judge and the Wife are haunted by spectral processions of their victims or of the Seven Deadly Sins. Whereas all of these spectres seem to be projections from within—‘våra egna sjuka drömmar’ (our own sick dreams—p. 41), the Wife suggests—other corrective spirits seem to have been sent by Providence to drive these sinners back onto the path of righteousness. Chief among these is The Other (Den Andra), a seedy, down-at-the-heel devil, who appears from time to time in the guise of a Schoolteacher, a Franciscan Monk, or of the Master of Ceremonies in Hell.¹⁶ In life he was an evil person who fell because he touched the forbidden tree and then went around tempting others to do the same; his punishment in death is to serve the forces of Good: not to tempt with wealth and power, but to punish with whips and scorpions (p. 58). Immune to apotropaia, this penitent devil cannot be banished by the sign of the cross or by music.

The conflict between good and evil in this play is scenically reinforced by the interplay of darkness and light. Both the Judge and the Wife are extremely fearful of the heat and light of the sun. Not only does the Judge prefer darkness, he blackens everything he touches: the silver service he has stolen is so tarnished that no amount of polishing can brighten it; and the orphan he has plundered and pushed into the life of a chimney sweep seems permanently besmirched. But whereas the imagery of darkness in this play is quite conventional, the light imagery is strikingly original. The Wife first sees the dancing sunbeam (‘sun-cat’) just after she speaks of dissolving Amalia's marriage; its subsequent appearances always highlight their evil deeds, such as, the expulsion of Adolf and the revelation that the Wife has lied about the monstrance she presented to the church. The ‘sun-cat’, in short, begins to stalk them like a beast of prey, tormenting and exposing them mercilessly.

One of the theological peculiarities of Strindberg's post-Inferno religion is that though he continued to reject the notion that man could be redeemed by the vicarious suffering of Christ, he eagerly accepted the idea of the Incarnation—even in its highly developed Roman Catholic form. He apparently took quite literally Jesus's words ‘Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein’ (Mark 10:15). Therefore in Advent the Christ Child becomes both the protector and the playmate of the innocent children, Erik and Thyra. The ‘sun-cat’, one of his attributes, becomes a helpful animal that leads the children directly into the land of enchantment. It literally becomes a cat:

LEK-KAMRATEN:
Kom barn! Ut i solen att fröjdas åt livet.
THYRA:
Få vi ta katten med oss; det ar så synd att han skall stanna har i mörkret?
LEK-KAMRATEN:
Ja, om han vill följa med er! Locka på honom!
ERIK och Thyra:
[gå mot dörren, sol-katten följer dem på golvet.]
ERIK:
Nej se så snäll han är! [Jollrar till sol-katten.] Kisse Misse Plurre Murre!
LEK-KAMRATEN:
Tag honom på armen nu Thrya för annars kommer han inte över tröskeln!
(PLAYMATE:
Come children—out into the sunlight to rejoice in life!
THYRA:
May we take the kitty with us? Such a pity to leave him here in the dark.
PLAYMATE:
Yes, if he'll come along! Coax him.
ERIK and Thyra:
[approach the door; the sun-cat follows them.]
ERIK:
Oh, look how good he is! [Talks affectionately to the sun-cat.] Here Puss Puss! Come, Pusscat!
PLAYMATE:
Pick him up now, Thyra. Otherwise he won't cross the threshold!)

—pp. 65-6

The land of enchantment they enter (Act III, Sc. 2) is a garden full of flowers and topiary hedges in the centre of which is a healing spring (said to have been touched by an angel). Beside the spring stands a giant Fuchsia (called Kristi Bloddroppar, ‘Christ's Blooddrops’, in Swedish), the only forbidden tree in this Eden. Far away we see a field of ripe grain, cliffs, ruined castles, and a gothic archway framing a statue of the Madonna and Child. The only disquieting elements in this earthly paradise are a scarecrow and the sooty chimney-sweep, who enters and timidly watches the children at play. Before revealing himself as the Christ Child accompanied by a lamb, the Playmate allows Erik and Thyra to tear down the scarecrow so that the birds will come to sing to them; then he washes (baptizes) the chimney-sweep in the healing spring and restores him to his lost mother.

Though the Playmate can easily turn punishment to play for the innocent children, their mother, Amalia, finds it impossible to make light of her unjust suffering. What pains her even more than the heavy work she must do is the fact that she cannot love the Wife, the woman she has always taken to be her mother. Though she feels guilty about this unnatural lack of love, she still refuses to accept the idea of suffering as punishment. The wise Neighbour, who becomes the spokesman in this play for some of Strindberg's religious ideas, comforts her by explaining the meaning of suffering: ‘Mitt goda barn: att lida rättvist, det göra straffångarne, och det är ingen ära, men att få lida orätt, det är en nåd och en prövning som den ståndaktige hämtar gyllene frukter av’ (My good child, to suffer justly is what prisoners do—and there's no honour in that; but to be allowed to suffer unjustly, that is a gift and a test which bring golden fruits to the steadfast—p. 35). As soon as she has undergone the tests set for her, the Neighbour reveals the secret of her life: her real mother is dead and the Wife is her stepmother. After learning this, Amalia can rejoice that God has allowed her to retain an unblemished image of her true mother; now she can understand and accept the cruelty of the Wife.

The tribulations of the Judge and the Wife more than counterbalance the saccharinity of the scenes involving the children in this play. Once the ‘sun-cat’ has begun the unmasking, the Judge and the Wife are visited by all manner of occult manifestations. In an atmosphere of mounting terror, they begin to suspect each other of poisoning the food they eat and the water they drink. But though they soon think of fleeing from their haunted home, holding a big auction, and starting a new life somewhere else, they continue to find rational explanations for these supernatural warnings. In Act IV the unmasking process begun by the ‘sun-cat’ is completed. The Wife meets her double, the Witch, at a crossroads and is outfitted for a ball in what turns out to be the Waiting Room in Hell. She meets and dances with the (recently deceased) Prince. When she unmasks him by referring to his hunchback, he pulls off her wig and threatens to remove her false teeth. Thus stripped, they recognize one another as brother and sister. No longer able to conceal her baseness, the Wife finds herself back at the crossroads, where the Witch sends her out to wander until she freezes to death in a marsh. In the mean while the Judge, who still refuses to believe in supernatural powers, is judged by an invisible tribunal (p. 102). When he threatens to appeal to a higher court, The Other tells him that his case has been through all the courts except the very highest and that he has been sentenced to be stoned to death. Not until they are reunited in the Waiting Room of Hell on Christmas Eve do the deceased Judge and the Wife, now both fully penitent, become capable of seeing what is truly to be seen. Despite their realization that the wrongs they have done cannot be undone, they still have some grounds for hope: The Other tells them that though the sun never penetrates to this region, on this one night of the year a single star ascends so high in the heaven that it can even be seen in Hell (p. 125). The ‘sun-cat’ has now been transformed into the star of Bethlehem. The mausoleum, the symbol of death and vainglory, is replaced by the nativity scene symbolizing life and hope of salvation. A choir sings the Gloria.

Stockenström sees the ending of Advent as lapsing into cheap, sentimental theatricality and suggests that if Strindberg had carried out his original plan for the mausoleum motif, Advent would have become the first of his Chamber Plays.¹⁷ Disconcerted by what he considers a highly unsuccessful blend of fairy-tale, mystery, nightmare, and stark realism in this play, Ollén too undervalues Advent.¹⁸ Both critics appear to ignore the generic paradigm Strindberg was at such pains to provide. Medieval dramatic method presupposed an unsophisticated audience that could easily accept sharp contrasts between comic, often crassly realistic scenes and sacred history. Moreover, it frequently staged simultaneous action: the torments of the damned in Hell juxtaposed to Jerusalem and the Temple. Advent, subtitled ‘Ett mysterium’ ends with a diptych: a nativity scene and an angel chorus—as seen and heard from Hell. The contrast between the two worlds of the play is as naive, as startling, and potentially as effective as the final scene in the 15th century Wakefield Master's Secunda pastorem: the thieving Mak has stolen a sheep from his fellow shepherds and his wife Gill concealed it by wrapping it in swaddling clothes and pretending it is her newborn babe; no sooner are these culprits unmasked and punished at the end of this farcical parody of the nativity story, than an angel appears to the shepherds announcing the birth of the Saviour. As at the end of Advent, a chorus sings the Gloria; then the transposed shepherds go to Bethlehem with touchingly humble gifts for the Holy Infant: a bunch of cherries, a bird, and a ball. They receive the benediction of the Blessed Virgin, who promises to pray her son to keep them from woe. In his modern mystery play, Advent, Strindberg is experimenting with a kind of religious theatre that he felt could accommodate both everyday realism and providential contradiction (vastation) and regeneration.

Advent, Strindberg's first attempt to adapt the sagospel to religious drama, has proved far less successful in the theatre than Brott och brott, his first attempt to use realistic ‘comedy’ as a medium for dramatizing what he called Nemesis Providentia. In a very famous passage in the Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge describes the origin of the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, he says that while he directed his endeavours to ‘characters supernatural, or at least romantic’, Wordsworth sought to ‘give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural’ by removing ‘the film of familiarity’ that makes us blind to the ‘wonders of the world before us’.¹⁹ True poetry, he implies, results from the tension between the willing, if momentary ‘suspension of disbelief’ (poetic faith) and the mind's sudden awakening from ‘the lethargy of custom’. Something very like this modal complementarity seems to be at work in Strindberg's ‘nemesis plays’, where we can see a similar tension between the Andersenian world of make-believe and the nightmarish Kiplingesque realities that make one believe.²⁰

The generic subtitle of Brott och brott has caused readers problems from the very start. Some early reviewers (Levertin, Warburg, and Wirsén) found ‘komedi’ utterly inappropriate (SV 40, p. 266); when he produced the play in 1902, Max Reinhardt relabelled it ‘tragicomedy’.²¹ This sort of discomfort with the generic subtitle shows the play to be an early example of a new mixed genre that has been variously described as ‘melodrama’,²² ‘metacomedy’,²³ ‘commedia’,²⁴ and as ‘dark comedy’, the modern umbrella mode defined by J. L. Styan.²⁵ Hans-Göran Ekman rightly suggests that Strindberg's use of the word ‘comedy’ is easier to understand if placed in a Dantean context, but one really need look no further than the kind of nineteenth-century well-made play in which conversion, a radical change of mental attitude, ‘unties the knot and brings the curtain down’²⁶—or to Kipling's short story ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’—to find the generic paradigms that underlie Brott och brott.²⁷

Though Brott och brott is simply a further development of the material on which Advent was based,²⁸ the realistic demands of the genre Strindberg is using in his second ‘nemesis play’ occasion a shift in scenic effects: in Advent he used lighting to represent the impingement of the transcendent world on everyday reality; here he uses sound to demonstrate the interaction between the two. The play opens in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, where Jeanne and her five-year-old daughter, Marion, have been waiting for two hours for Maurice, Jeanne's lover and Marion's father. In the background is a stone cross bearing the message of the play: O crux! Ave spes unica! Though a friendly Abbé translates the Latin words for her, Jeanne is not yet ready to understand the secret of suffering, which is the true meaning of the inscription. A mourning woman kneeling nearby at a flower-bedecked grave seems to be talking with the deceased, but her words are inaudible, and Jeanne, who no longer believes in life after death, rejects the notion that there can be any communication with the supermundane. The interaction between these two worlds gives us the plot of Brott och brott. The real hero, the intriguer, as Strindberg said in a letter to his friend Littmansson (XIII, p. 120), is ‘The Invisible One’, who—like Adolphe later in the play—reveals himself in veiled terms through en halvkväden visa (literally, ‘a half-sung song’—SV 40, p. 236).

In the first scene of the play, Jeanne, a good-hearted working-class woman, fears that her long liaison with Maurice may soon end. After years of trying to make his mark as a playwright, Maurice believes that his new play will make him rich and famous, but he is too embarrassed by Jeanne's lack of sophistication to want her by his side on opening night. The only bond that still holds the couple together is their deep love for Marion. Sensing his discomfiture, Jeanne refuses the theatre ticket Maurice half-heartedly offers her, but gives him a package containing a scarf and a pair of gloves that she begs him to wear in her honour on the evening of his triumph. Shortly thereafter at Madame Catherine's Crémerie, the favourite haunt of Maurice and his artist friend, Adolphe, Maurice is transfixed at his first encounter with Adolpe's mistress, Henriette. Fearing that he might lose Henriette to Maurice, Adolphe has tried to prevent their meeting; now his worst fears come true. Rus (intoxication) was Strindberg's working title for the play; that word perfectly describes the passion that flares up in Maurice and Henriette, who eagerly accepts the theatre ticket Jeanne refused. Though she and Maurice insist that Adolphe join them at a café after the theatre, they already see him as superfluous.

Though Maurice fancies himself an amoral, bohemian artist, he is really—to an even greater extent than Tonio Kröger—‘a bourgeois manqué’. His extremely idealistic play, as described by Adolphe, easily wins popular approval because it rehabilitates mankind and frees the public from lifelong nightmares (p. 184). Ironically, though Maurice convinces the public that man is a bit better than his reputation, he himself is attracted to the evil in Henriette. Waiting in vain for Adolphe, who is present only as an empty champagne glass, Maurice and Henriette become intoxicated with passion. Crowning him with laurel, Henriette tempts him to glory in his theatrical triumph, and he worships her as Astrate, the jealous incarnation of sexual pleasure who demands human sacrifice. His best friend, Adolphe, becomes the first sacrificial victim. Jeanne, whose tawdry gift of a scarf and a pair of gloves Henriette-Astrate ridicules and throws into the empty fireplace, is the next. But Maurice cannot betray his bourgeois values with impunity: ‘half-sung songs’ begin to reach him from the hidden world.

In the next room someone begins playing the allegretto movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 17—now softly, now wildly—ceaselessly repeating the transitional passage (measures 96-107) that Strindberg told his friend Littmansson affected him ‘som en centrumborr i samvetet på mig’ (like a centre-bit drilling into my conscience—XIII, p. 115). The unseen pianist starts playing just at the moment when Maurice begins to regret his failure to join his old friends, as promised, for a celebration at the Crémerie. Next the absent Adolf begins to speak through the mouth of Maurice, who imagines the speech he will make when and if he does show up: ‘Ja, jag litar på dig Maurice, dels därför att du är min vän, dels därför att dina känslor äro bundna på annat håll!’ (Yes, I trust you, Maurice, partly because you are my friend, partly because your feelings are anchored elsewhere!—p. 177). This epideictic exercise proves too much for Maurice, who begins to shudder with cold—or with terror. When Henriette covers him with her pelisse, he feels that he has received her skin, has been invested with a new soul and new thoughts—he even believes he is beginning to assume a female body. At this point Maurice's guilty conscience is fully articulate: the music becomes so obtrusive that it drives the hapless lovers to seek refuge at the pavilion in the Bois de Boulogne.

Henriette is almost entirely motivated by hatred for the bourgeois values that still have such a hold on Maurice. By helping her mother and her siblings wish the life out of her father, she early became guilty of a thought crime, a crime that cannot be punished by any court. Later her bungled attempt to perform an abortion on a friend made her guilty of an actionable crime, manslaughter. Killing both her friend and the unborn child placed Henriette outside society, and cut her off from reality. Since that moment, she tells Maurice, she has only lived a half-life, a dreamlife, in constant dread of discovery and the gallows (p. 175). Though Adolphe's goodness attracted her ‘som ett vackert försvunnet barndomsminne’ (like a beautiful, vanished childhood memory—p. 176), she is now too steeped in blood to regain her innocence. Hoping to find a Nietzschean superman in Maurice, she soon discovers that he is neither beyond good, nor truly capable of evil. Embarrassed by the generosity and resignation of Adolphe, whom she had arrogantly hoped to humiliate at the pavilion in the Bois, Henriette-Astarte craves the sacrifice of the child, Marion, and the intoxicated Maurice assents without protest and wishes the child dead. They plan to break old ties unceremoniously and flee south to a new life the very next day. At the moment of her triumph, however, Henriette recoils when she draws the five of diamonds from a pack of cards. This symbolic representation of the supports under the gallows at the Place Rouquette softens her. She sends Maurice to bid farewell to Marion one last time before their departure.

Adolphe does not emerge as a major character in this play until the third act. He too has experienced an artistic triumph: he has been awarded a gold medal for a painting that subsequently fetched a great price in London. But because he shuns success, he has returned the medal. Though he claims not to believe in God, events in his life have made him aware that some eternal power permeates existence and steers our lives; therefore he can easily forgive Maurice and Henriette, because he feels they are not acting of their own free will: they were simply driven into each other's arms by the intrigues of this invisible power. Only those who have needed forgiveness, that is, those who have committed an act for which they are truly penitent, are capable of forgiving others. The thought crime that has altered his life, as he tells Henriette in a ‘half-sung song’ about a fictional friend of his, was his wish that his father would die (pp. 211-12). When his father did suddenly die, Adolphe was so obsessed with the idea that he was a murderer that for a time he was confined in a mental institution. Cured there of all but his sense of guilt, he has continued to punish himself for his evil thoughts. Near the end of the play he advises Henriette to part with Maurice, abandon her artistic career, and return home to her mother. Above all, she must try to turn her hatred against herself, to lance, as it were, her own boils (p. 236).

Maurice's thought crime, his wish that little Marion were out of the way, is suddenly fulfilled when the child is found dead shortly after his last visit to her. The testimony of good, (invisible) waiters at the café and the pavilion cast suspicion on him. His play is cancelled, his reputation ruined, his former friends of two minds about his guilt or innocence. Worst of all, he and Henriette begin to suspect everyone else of vengeful acts and each other of murder—like the Judge and the Wife in Advent, they poison life for each other. Their lives become hellish: Henriette is mistakenly arrested as a common prostitute; Maurice is accused of being her pimp and is even forced to spend a night in jail, a night that permanently alters his character. Even the discovery that Marion has died of a rare disease—one that she may have contracted from the flowers she was playing with in the cemetery—cannot allay the consciousness of sin that has begun to drive Maurice to accept the Abbé's oft-expressed view that these uncanny events ‘är icke människors verk’ (pp. 198, 202, and 209—are not the work of man). After two excruciating days, Maurice feels ready to renounce hope of worldly success and to seek refuge in the bosom of the Church. Not only is Marion dead, but he has also lost both Jeanne and Henriette forever. His final dilemma arises when he must choose between joining penitent prison inmates at a religious service or receiving the homage of his admirers at the theatre, where his play has been reinstated. At the banal conclusion of the play, he solves his problem by deciding to go to church that night and to the theatre the next.

‘Mitt pjesslut är nog banalt’ (My dénouement is certainly banal—XIII, p. 120, n.6), Strindberg admitted to his friend Littmansson, but this kind of ending is, after all, part of the generic paradigm for the comedy of conversion. The shocking peripety, the sudden death of little Marion, removes the ‘film of familiarity’ from Maurice's bourgeois world and leads him to the awareness that the intrigues of the Invisible One were intended for his moral edification. In other words, Brott och brott, no less than Advent, is a ‘nemesis play’, loosely based on Swedenborgian ideas of contradiction leading to regeneration. Sprinchorn makes a very convincing case for a Kierkegaardian-Swedenborgian reading of Brott och brott.²⁹ It is also possible to make a Kierkegaardian reading of the play's generic (or modal) subtitle. Following Aristotle, Kierkegaard saw the unity of the tragic and the comic in the fact that both arise from contradiction (Modsigelse). The tragic is a suffering contradiction, the comic a relatively painless one. This is not to say, however, that the comic does not involve suffering; in fact, Kierkegaard felt that suffering is the very source of our sense of the comic. One of his most striking examples of the relation between suffering and the comic occurs in the long fictional diary entitled ‘Skyldig?’—‘Ikke-Skyldig?’ (Guilty?/Not Guilty?) in Stadier paa Livets Vej (Stages on Life's Way):

The more one suffers, the more sense, I believe, one gains for the comic. Only by the most profound suffering does one gain real competence in the comic, which with a word magically transforms the rational creature called man into a Fratze [caricature]. This competence is like a policeman's self-assurance when he abruptly grips his club and does not tolerate any talk or blocking of traffic. The victim protests, he objects, he insists on being respected as a citizen, he demands a hearing—immediately there is a second rap from the club, and that means: Please move on! Don't stand there! In other words, to want to stand there to protest, to demand a hearing, is just a poor, pathetic wretch's attempt to really amount to something, but the comic turns the fellow around in a hurry and, by seeing him from behind, with the help of his club makes him comic.³⁰

Seen objectively, the suffering of the indignant citizen is laughable; he is the ‘fall guy’, he who gets slapped, one of the mainstays of the comic tradition. Swedenborgian suffering (vastation), on the other hand, is a painful, totally subjective experience. Strindberg has a remarkable talent for making us experience both sides of the Kierkegaardian comic at virtually the same time, as when Henriette is picked up by the police as a common prostitute, or when Maurice and Henriette identify themselves with Adam and Eve as they are being driven out of the Jardin de Luxembourg. We experience their suffering as both pathetic and comic, because we are able to see it both subjectively and objectively. In this sense, ‘the comic’ perfectly characterizes the mode of Brott och brott, where the protagonist is turned around in a hurry by his unrelenting, but invisible antagonist. We feel here the same peculiar vis comica that Dürrenmatt sensed coursing through Dödsdansen, which he reduced to a boxing match in his ‘arrangement’ of the play, Play Strindberg.³¹ One critic describes Strindberg's Alice and Edgar as ‘tragic characters in a comic situation.’³² One might say the same about both the Judge and the Wife in Advent and Henriette and Maurice in Brott och brott.

Though the characteristic mutability of literary genres makes them very difficult to define, generic statements, as Fowler observes, are ‘instrumentally critical’.³³ In other words, we cannot fully discover the meaning of a literary work until we have determined the generic matrix from which it issues. The multiplicity of generic and modal terms that have been applied to Strindberg's post-Inferno works indicates that his is a particularly difficult case. In creating the religious sagospel and the comedy of conversion—or what I have been calling ‘the nemesis play’—Strindberg certainly modified two familiar genres. Reading Advent and Brott och brott together, however, invites us to see these two works not as complementary genres, but as unfused modal variants of the same hybrid genre, the sagospel. Both plays involve the interaction between two worlds. In Advent, the Coleridgean component, we wander in imaginary gardens with real toads in them, while Brott och brott, the Wordsworthian component, excites ‘a feeling analogous to the supernatural’ in us by placing us in real gardens full of imaginary toads. This kind of modal complementarity would seem to be a key to many of Strindberg's later works. In some of his ‘nemesis plays’—like Dödsdansen—the Wordsworthian mode prevails; others—like Spöksonaten—are cast in a Coleridgean mode. ‘A man of genius will create for his theatre a form which has not existed before him,’ wrote Théodore de Banville, ‘and which after him will suit no one else’.³⁴ The Strindbergian ‘nemesis play’ is the perfect example of that form.

Notes

1. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters: 1898-1910, edited by Dan H. Laurence (New York, 1972), pp. 907-9. British audiences were, of course, already very familiar with the fairy extravaganzas of writers like J. R. Planché and W. S. Gilbert, whose works inspired the political and philosophical extravaganzas that Shaw wrote in the latter part of his career. See M. Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton, N.J., 1963), pp. 380-428.

2. Gunnar Ollén, Strindbergs dramatik (Stockholm, 1982), p. 574. Strindberg's other four sagospel are Himmelrikets nycklar (1892), Advent (1898; publ. 1899), Svanevit (1901), and Abu Casems tofflor (1908). See G. Lindström, ‘Sagospel’, in Svenskt litteratur lexikon (Lund, 1964), pp. 440-1.

3. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 256.

4. See G. Stockenström, Ismael i öknen (Uppsala, 1972), p. 426.

5. This generic designation was coined by Cyrus Hoy. See his The Hyacinth Room (London, 1964), pp. 292ff.

6. See Lindström, pp. 440-1.

7. See Émile Zola, Le Naturalisme au théâtre, ed. E. Fasquelle (Paris, 1928), pp. 285-293.

8. See Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy-Tales (Princeton, N.J., 1987), p. 61.

9. Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: an Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (New York, 1987), p. 122.

10. See Gunnar Brandell, Strindberg in Inferno, translated by B. Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 98-159.

11. The manuscript of Ockulta dagboken is preserved in the Royal Library in Stockholm. In 1977 Gidlund's Publishing Company brought out a facsimile edition of the handwritten manuscript, hereafter cited in parentheses after a quotation as OD.

12. Besides being the generic ancestor of Strindberg's four post-Inferno sagospel, Lycko-Pers resa also gave rise to a group of vandringsdramer based on the quest theme: Himmelrikets nycklar, Till Damaskus I-III, Ett drömspel, and Stora landsvägen. The protagonist in each of these works is involved in a metaphysical quest that brings him into conflict both with other people and with supernatural powers. See G. Ollén, p. 59 and Ruprecht Volz, Strindbergs Wanderungsdramen (Munich, 1982). Volz defines the Wandrungsdrama as ‘[ein] Schauspiel … in dessen Mittelpunkt ein wandernder Mensch steht, der im Verlauf der dramatischen Begebenheiten die Schauplätze wechselt,’ p. 29. To confuse matters still further, in the brief preface to Ett drömspel, Strindberg refers to Till Damaskus as his ‘former dreamplay’. This reference has given rise to widespread acceptance of yet another Strindbergian genre, ‘the dreamplay’. See Richard Bark, Strindbergs drömspelsteknik—i drama och teater (Lund, 1981).

13. Hans-Göran Ekman (SV 40, p. 255) quotes Gustaf Uddgren's account of an interview with Strindberg, who said that he chose the generic subtitle of Advent to underscore the fact that an age of religious drama was in the offing—‘liksom dessa mysterier, som inledde Englands dramatiska storhetstid’ (like those mystery plays that preceded the great period of English drama). English critics borrowed the distinction between ‘mystery play’ (a play based on a biblical subject) and ‘miracle play’ (a play concerned with legends of the saints) from French in the 18th century; see E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (New York, 1947), p. 16. In Swedish, ett mysterium means both ‘a medieval play based on biblical material’ and ‘a reality that cannot be understood, but is the object of belief’. Strindberg clearly wishes to activate both meanings in connection with Advent.

14. Whether or not one agrees with Karl Jaspers's diagnosis that Swedenborg and Strindberg were both suffering from schizophrenia, it is clear that both shared a poetic or mythic need for the supernatural, for a world where the question of reality does not arise. ‘Enfin on peut prouver l'existence de ce monde surnaturel en lui donnant la plénitude sensible d'une chose vécue subjectivement, et c'est cette expérience qui précisément est valable pour Strindberg et Swedenborg,’ Jaspers writes in Strindberg et van Gogh, Hoelderlin et Swedenborg, translated by H. Naef (Paris, 1953), p. 188.

15. On 13 December 1898 he made the following entry in his ‘occult’ diary: ‘På morgonen när jag satt vid skrifbordet … syntes en sol-katt pa väggen framför mig så att jag vid en rörelse på hufvudet hade honom i nacken. Jfr. sol-katten bildades af rak-spegeln i sofrummet./ (Jfr. Solkatten i mitt drama som nu skrifves ‘Mausolén’ (This morning as I was sitting at my desk … a dancing sunbeam appeared on the opposite wall so that when I moved my head it reflected on the back of my neck—OD, p. 81). Cf. the reflection came from the shaving mirror in my bedroom./ Cf. the dancing sunbeam in the play I'm writing now, ‘The Mausoleum’).

16. Den Andra's name is ambiguous. Though the primary meaning in this context would appear to be ‘The Other’ (i.e. ‘The Devil’), this character also uses it to mean ‘the second’: ‘Jag blev den Andre emedan jag ville vara den Förste’ (I became the Second because I wanted to be the First—SV 40, p. 43).

17. Stockenström, p. 403.

18. Ollén, p. 268.

19. S. T. Coleridge, Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. D. Stauffer (New York, 1951), p. 264.

20. Whereas Strindberg apparently saw profound metaphysical implications in the sudden surprising turns of plot in many of Kipling's short stories, Fowler (p. 166) sees Kipling as a transitional figure who continued to use peripeteias in a way that had been rendered meaningless by the decay of the universe of belief: ‘Kipling is a transitional instance: his stories still have plots, and plots still take odd turns (as in Without Benefit of Clergy), but the metaphysical implication seems too explicit for the device to hold much potential for future development’. Strindberg obviously felt that sudden turns of plot, such as the unexpected death of little Marion, do disclose the mysteries that are usually concealed from us.

21. See Ollén, p. 282.

22. See E. Sprinchorn, Strindberg as Dramatist (New Haven, Conn., 1982), p. 241, n., where Sprinchorn suggests that Strindberg uses setting to hint that this play is both ‘a melodrama with deeper implications and a comedy about crime.’ See also M. Valency, The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama (New York, 1963), p. 311, where Valency says that ‘by exaggerating the conventional effects of melodrama well past the point of credibility, [Strindberg] succeeded not only in giving to a banal action the fabulistic quality of a fairy-tale, but also the glaring realism of a nightmare.’

23. See Levin, pp. 123-132.

24. See Hoy, pp. 293-4, where he defines Strindberg's comic manner as ‘laced with irony, but compassionate’.

25. See J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy (Cambridge, 1962), who regards Brott och brott as a prime, early example of the unpopular, implicitly didactic ‘drama of the split mind’ (p. 281) that he designates ‘the dark comedy’.

26. See William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (New York, 1928), p. 339.

27. In a letter to his friend Axel Herrlin (XIII, p. 248), Strindberg claimed that the form of the play was inspired by the last movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 17 (Op. 31, No. 2). Because Beethoven told his friend Schindler that the explanation to this sonata could be found by reading Shakespeare's The Tempest, this work is now usually called ‘The Tempest’. In the same letter Strindberg says that his friend Peterson-Berger told him that this piece is called ‘die Gespenstersonate’ (the ‘ghost sonata’), which made the work seem even more relevant to his play that he had at first imagined. For a fascinating discussion of the structural parallels between the allegretto movement of the Beethoven sonata and Brott och brott, see Sprinchorn, pp. 240-5.

28. See Stockenström, p. 428.

29. Sprinchorn, pp. 238-9.

30. S. Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, translated H. V. & E. H. Hong (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp. 245-6.

31. Dürrenmatt himself claimed that through his efforts a bourgeois marriage tragedy (‘eine bürgerliche Ehetragödie’) had been transformed into a comedy about bourgeois marriage tragedies (‘eine Komödie über die bürgerlichen Ehetragödien’). See F. Dürrenmatt, Play Strindberg: Totentanz nach August Strindberg (Zürich, 1969), p. 67. For an interesting discussion of the relation between tragedy and comedy in Brott och brott see Hans-Göran Ekman, ‘Klädernas funktion i Strindbergs Brott och brott’ in Läskonst Skrivkonst Diktkonst: till Thure Stenström (Uppsala, 1987), pp. 330-31.

32. K. S. Whitton, The Theatre of Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1980), p. 205.

33. See Fowler, p. 38.

34. See ‘How to Write a Play’, translated D. Miles in Papers on Playmaking, ed. B. Matthews (New York, 1957), p. 83.