[In the following essay, Wilander compares the way that three history plays, including Strindberg's Gustav III, treat their subjects.]

Shakespeare är providentialist som antikens tragödier voro,” Strindberg declared in Öppna brev till Intima Teatern (1909; Letters to the Intimate Theater), “därför försummar han icke det historiska, utan låter den högsta rätten skipas ända till småaktighet [114]” (“Shakespeare is a Providentialist, just as the ancient writers of tragedy were, so he does not leave history without making sure that divine justice has been distributed even to the point of pettiness”). Here Strindberg seems to speak more of his own vision of Shakespeare than of a Shakespearean's, but in opening the question of meting out justice “even to the point of pettiness,” he raises an issue central to the criticism of both playwrights. The context of the remark is a discussion of Julius Caesar (1599), a play in which Shakespeare forces an audience to question the supernatural dimension of history. The omens that charge the air in the play's third scene; the nightmares that warn Caesar, as does the soothsayer, from the Capitol; the visit of Caesar's ghost to Phillippi—all these suggest to us, as to Casca, a possibility of divine intervention in the human sphere. “Either there is a civil strife in heaven, /” Casca proposes, “Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, / Incenses them to send destruction” (I.iii.10-12). For Casca, the portents of the night before the planned assassination of Caesar demand a religious explanation. The problem, as it so often is in Shakespeare's Roman plays, is that the pagan religion itself offers no answer: either the pagan heavens are another Rome, torn by civil war, and the portents a sign of that disturbance, or the gods are indeed offering to punish the “saucy” world. Whatever is the case, “I believe they are portentous things,” Casca continues. His companion, the cool and sceptical Cicero, fails to follow along: “Indeed it is a strange disposed time,” he agrees, “But men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (31.34-35). Shakespeare's play pursues this observation, as Brutus's and Cassius's construction of the thing—the phenomenon of Caesar—collides with the thing itself.

The metaphor that informs Julius Caesar's scrutiny of “Providentialism” is the conventional one of the theatrum mundi: the role Cassius casts Brutus in, the role Brutus envisions himself playing in history, the part the conspirators see Marc Antony as playing at Caesar's funeral are all miscast and misconceived. Strindberg, in Gustav III (1902), employs the same image and to much the same effect. For both playwrights, the theater of the world provides a double perspective from which to regard human action in history. The image provides a way in which history can become charged with meaning, as man the actor plays out his role before the all-seeing eye of God. No detail is missed, for divine justice watches every aspect of every performance. Such an argument informs eighteenth-century defenses of the theater, where representations of “poetic justice,” embodying the judgments of Providence, could be said to be more “accurate” (as Thomas Rymer put it) than representations of the actual events of history, which would be morally less clear (22). Yet the image of the theater of the world cuts another way as well: the Platonic antitheatrical tradition, rejecting all representation as dangerously false, sees man the actor as self-deluded, his actions trivialized and made meaningless by their analogy to the world of the stage.

Explanation of portents and omens with reference to the divine, as Cicero makes clear, involves the imaginative determination that strange weather must contain some sort of meaning; it is easy to reject Casca's response as superstitious. And because Casca himself cannot decide if the omens portend the action of divine retribution or merely indicate a random spill-over of divine “civil strife,” we can easily be skeptical of his construction. Less easy to dismiss is the conspirators' vision of themselves as actors: “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” exclaims Cassius as he stoops to wash his hands in Caesar's blood (III.i.111-13). The statement is prophetic, yet utterly misconstrued, for these men would never “be called / The men that gave their country liberty” (117-18), at least not on the English stage, in the specific state unborn that Shakespeare's audience would inhabit.

But the audience's relationship to the characters' interpretations of the events they participate in is not simply one of anachronistic superiority. “I think it is the weakness of my eyes,” Brutus declares when he sees the ghost of Caesar, “That shapes this monstrous apparition” (IV. iii. 276-77). The audience would agree, but that we see it, too. “You know I held Epicurus strong / And his opinion,” Cassius confesses to Messala at the end; “Now I change my mind / And partly credit things that do presage” (V.i.77-78). “Partly credit”: there's the rub. Only history—in the ironic fulfillments of the prophecies staged here—lends meaning to the “things themselves.” But history itself is an imaginatively constructed narrative, conveying meaning as it simultaneously conveys artificiality.

Julius Caesar brings the issue of historical imagination to the forefront. The question of whether Caesar's assassination is just is absorbed into the larger question of whether Rome exists in a context in which divine retribution can take place or whether Rome's civil wars are merely a reflection of a random universe. Strindberg's profound attraction to Julius Caesar is an acknowledgement of a shared recognition of the urgency with which Providentialism leads to this larger question. The system of reference to Julius Caesar and to Corneille's Cinna (1640) in Gustav III places Strindberg's play solidly within the tradition of theatrum mundi; the play's vision of history privileges a Shakespearean Providentialism over a Corneillian glorification of the individual will. Gustav's actions are thus seen as deluded, his prophecies ironically fulfilled; but his humiliations lead to the corollary recognition, for an audience, that the world is not random. History is a meaningful progression; by moving in the wrong direction, Gustav confirms for us that a direction does exist.

Like Shakespeare, Strindberg charges his dramatized history with meaning through the use of prophetic omens and through invocation of the theatrum mundi image. They fuse in a densely allusive passage in the third act, when Gustav interrupts the meeting of the conspirators at the home of Clas Horn. “Soyons ami, Cinna, c'est moi qui t'en convie,” he declaims upon his entrance (39:353). The quotation from Corneille's Cinna (V.i. 1701) is both metatheatrical and charged with historical irony. Gustav quotes from the scene in which Auguste confronts Cinna with his knowledge that Cinna has conspired to assassinate him: in Corneille's play, the emperor overcomes the conspirator with his clemency and persuades him to yield. Playing Auguste in this scene, Gustav thus informs the would-be assassins of his knowledge of their schemes and suggests that clemency would greet confession. “Pour être plus qu'un roi, tu te crois quelque chose,” responds Baron Pechlin. Pechlin quotes from a different scene altogether (III.iv.990). His line is spoken by Émilie to Cinna; she showers him with scorn after his decision, earlier in the play, not to kill Auguste. Cinna's claim that a mere Roman citizen is greater than a king wins her contempt. There is a gender shift here, too. Pechlin, by speaking the lines of Cinna's lover, challenges his Roman, antimonarchical values, and—by extension—his manhood. “Prends un siège, Cinna,” continues Gustav, reverting to Corneille's fifth act (V.i.1425). If we recall, as Strindberg must have, that the role Gustav III played in court performances of Cinna was the title role, not the role of the emperor Auguste, the ironies multiply (Levertin 71).

The struggle for mastery in this scene is a struggle to control the range of allusion. Strindberg's Gustav, casting himself in the role of the clement and wise Auguste, attributes to himself a Corneillian ethic of self-mastery. Through the first two acts of the play, Gustav has been presented as controlling events through masquerade and imposture. The men at Holmberg's bookstore have been duped by false reports of the king's defeats; in the second act, when we first see Gustav, he skillfully adapts his behavior to each of his visitors with the aid of a mirror. He sets out at the end of that act to solve his political problems by dressing in traditional costume and rallying the Dalesmen to his support, as his ancestor Gustav Vasa had done.

The rivalry in the third act between Gustav and Pechlin for control over Corneille's text ends in Gustav's confusion and discomfiture, which mark the turning point of the play. Gustav suddenly feels a disturbing presence and asks if there might be a cat in the room. Anckarström, who left the scene to hide on the veranda when Gustav entered, intrudes upon the king's consciousness as a vague sense of foreboding. The conspirators make explicit the threat he represents by suggesting that what Gustav senses might be the ghost of Göran Persson, advisor to the ill-fated Erik XIV. For an audience, the shudder of Gustav here is accompanied by a double irony, historical and metatheatrical. We recognize in Anckarström the assassin who will be successful—but not within the play itself—and so catch a glimpse of the historical future to which the play alludes. We also hear a reference to Strindberg's earlier historical play, Erik XIV (1899), with its powerful portrayal of another self-deluded monarch's fall. Finally, we must bear in mind Pechlin's characterization of Anckarström as “Brutus, brutal Brutus” (39:356), with its evocation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

But the Brutus of Julius Caesar is himself encircled by the same multiple ironies of reference, historical and theatrical. “There was a Brutus once,” Cassius reminds him, “that would have brooked / Th'eternal devil to keep his state in Rome / As easily as a king” (I.ii.159-61). Shakespeare's Brutus takes on the role of his great ancestor, the liberator of Rome from Tarquin's tyranny, only to find himself cast by Marc Antony's oration in the role of “honorable man,” traitor to his benefactor. Civil war and parricide are the fruits of this assassination, not liberty. Corneille's Cinna, too, finds himself confronted with the historical irony of the two Brutuses—Lucius Junius the liberator and Marcus the parricide. Émilie insists that Cinna finish the work of Brutus and Cassius; Cinna recalls Brutus's hesitation on the brink of murder.

Behind the perplexity of models for Brutus in both plays lies a further confusion of models for Cinna. His problem in Corneille's play is one of choosing either to imitate Brutus or to serve Auguste. Strindberg, in linking Gustav with Corneille's Cinna, alludes to this choice. The error of casting, since Strindberg's Gustav takes the role of Auguste, while the historical Gustav is known to have taken the role of Cinna, compounds the perplexity. Pechlin, playing Émilie and shifting scenes, tries to manipulate Gustav into playing Cinna, a role that he rejects. Confusion about who is Cinna, furthermore, appears again to be a reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. In a notorious case of mistaken identity, Cinna the poet is mistaken for Cinna the conspirator by the Roman mob and torn to pieces. Gustav's models extend beyond the two Brutuses to Cinna the poet and Cinna the conspirator. In Strindberg's play, Gustav is both a poet himself and a sponsor of poets, both a conspirator himself and the victim of conspirators.

Gustav, sticking to his goal of liberty and to his models, insists that he is a Brutus. But he does not recognize, as Strindberg does, the doubleness that this identification, like the identification with Cinna, implies. Gustav reminds his queen of his successful revolution, when he “spelade Brutus och störtade vadmals-Caesarna [Strindberg, 39:336]” (“played Brutus to those homespun Caesars”). Role reversal figures here as it does throughout Strindberg's characterization of Gustav, “full av motsägelser, en tragiker som spelar komedi i livet, en hjälte och en dansmästare, en enväldig frihetsvän, en humanitetssträvare, en Frekrik den Stores, Josef II:s och Voltaires lärling [50:250]” (“full of contradictions, a tragedian who played comedy with his life; a hero and a dancing master; an absolutist who loved freedom; a fighter for human rights; a disciple of Frederick the Great, Joseph II, and Voltaire”). Gustav echoes Strindberg's paradoxical formulations in the second act of the play. “Jag är ju rabulisten, demokraten, den förste medborgaren i ett fritt land! Folkets man ock de förtrycktas försvarare! Jag är Rousseaus lärjunge … och Voltaires! Samhällsfördraget le Contrat Social är mitt evangelium, jag har det på mitt nattduksbord. Georg Washington är min vän! Franklin mitt ideal! Där har du mig! [39:314]” (“I'm the rabblerouser,” he declares, “the democrat, the hater of the nobility, the first citizen of a free land! A man of the people, defender of the oppressed, I'm Rousseau's disciple … and Voltaire's. The social contract—Le contrat social—is my gospel, I keep it on my night table! George Washington is my friend, Franklin my ideal. There you have me!”). Like Shakespeare's Brutus, Strindberg's Gustav has cast himself in a role that history will not permit him to play. His self-proclamation here is of the same order as “I am Cinna the poet!”

The play concentrates on Gustav's self-contradictory policy of achieving liberal reform by re-establishing absolutism. Envisioning himself to be a Frederick the Great, the eighteenth century's perfect specimen of the enlightened despot, Gustav resents the free press that he himself liberated earlier and cruelly engineers the Schröderheim's divorce. Against a backdrop of an international drive towards liberation (Washington is elected, and the Bastille falls during the period of the play), Gustav institutes absolutist rule (“Vilken paradox! [39:376]” [“What a paradox”], his favorite, Armfelt, exclaims in the fourth act). Imagining himself to be an ideal of absolutist politics—Frederick or Corneille's Auguste—Strindberg's Gustav is lost in a hall of historically ironic mirrors.

“O, store Caesar, akta dig för Idus Martii [366]” (“Beware the Ides of March, Caesar”), Lady Schröderheim greets Gustav, when she appears costumed as the Fury Megaera in the fête champêtre of the final act. By quoting directly from Shakespeare's play, Strindberg adds a further dimension to the Soothsayer's line, even as he assigns the line to one of Gustav's victims, who now appears in vengeful guise. What Lady Schröderheim speaks is not merely prophecy, but one of the most famous prophecies in all of historical drama. Thus the line carries with it the full implications of Caesar's perilous blindness and reminds us of Shakespeare's urgent questioning of the nature of omens and prophecies. Like Caesar—Shakespeare's Caesar, not Corneille's Auguste, who with forethought and persuasion avoids assassination—Gustav believes what he chooses to believe and remains blind to the self-contradictory historical roles he asserts the freedom to play.

“Caesars lycka” (“Caesar's luck”), Gustav claims in the play's final moment, protects him; “Var det inte någon some hette Brutus? [Strindberg, 39:398]” (“Wasn't there someone named Brutus?”) asks the queen. Gustav's failure in historical understanding is highlighted by his failure to grasp the full context of his allusion. The scene both presages and postpones Gustav's doom, as the queen inadvertently blocks Anckarström's line of fire. Unaware of the assassin's presence, Gustav correctly envisions his situation as that of a king in a chess game, with the queen blocking the threat of checkmate: “Drottningen är den starkaste pjäsen i spelet,” he jokes, “och har till uppgift att skydda kungen [398]” (“The queen is the most powerful piece in the game, and her function is protecting the king”). The reference to Strindberg's image of history in “Världshistoriens mystik” (“The Mysticism of World History”) as “ett kolossalt schakparti av en ensam spelare som leder både witt och svart [54:353]” (“a colossal chess-game, with a solitary player moving both black and white”) is clear. Gustav's absolutist goals are at odds with the current of history and will be wiped out, just as his assassin will eventually succeed. The only significant thing that can happen to a king in chess is that it can be checkmated.

But the image of the chess game, like the dense texture of self-fulfilling prophecy and omen in both Gustav III and Julius Caesar, points in two directions. In it, as in the image of theatrum mundi, human agency is belittled by analogy to the game, but there remains the further dimension of the solitary chessplayer. Like God in the theatrum mundi, this player is audience, playwright, and historian all in one. For both Strindberg and Shakespeare, human activity takes place in a grand arena. Nothing could be less like their vision than that of Corneille, whose Rome is haunted by no omens and whose Cinna and Émilie, learning their self-mastery from Auguste, master their vengeful passions at the end. “Men at some times are masters of their fates,” Cassius urges; “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves that we are underlings” (I.ii.139-41). But the faults that are in Brutus and Cassius are most clearly marked by their illusion that they can master fate. Likewise, Strindberg's Gustav fails to recognize that the roles he adopts, like his policies, are self-contradictory. “Liberty,” “freedom,” the concepts to which Gustav pays lip-service as he engineers his absolutist coup, will prevail, although Anckarström's act, like Gustav's reforms, will be disastrous in the short run. The “conscious will” that directs Strindberg's history pushes towards individual rights and freedom from prejudice, ends that Gustav dimly intuits but cannot achieve. This Hegelian paradox—that of a deterministic universal movement of history towards individual human liberation—is at the heart of Strindberg's vision of history. The techniques of Shakespeare's dramatic historiography—misinterpreted omens, self-fulfilling prophecies, the image of the “world as stage”—permit Strindberg to examine not only the paradoxes of Gustav's personality and policies, but also the paradox of history itself.

Works Cited

Corneille, Pierre. Cinna, in Théâtre Complet., Ed. Maurice Rat. Vol. 1. Paris: Garnier, 1966.

Levertin, Oskar. Teater och drama under Gustaf III. 2nd ed. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1911.

Rymer, Thomas. The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer. Ed. Curt A. Zimansky. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959.

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. In The Complete Works. General ed. Alfred Harbage. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969.

Strindberg, August. Samlade skrifter. Ed. John Landquist. Vols. 39 (for Gustav III), 50 (for Öppna brev till Intime Teatern), and 54 (for “Världshistoriens mystik”). Stockholm: Bonnier, 1916, 1919, 1920. 55 vols. 1912-20.