[In the following essay, Loomis describes the religious and Biblical reference in the play Easter.]

August Strindberg's Easter has been called a “Passion Play,”¹ and in a special way it is. But we must clarify the contextual meaning of that statement. The play dramatizes imitations of Christ's Passion within individual Swedish Christians at the turn of the twentieth century; yet Christ's own Passion also seems strongly present within the onstage events. The play is set during the first three days of Easter weekend, with conscious back-reference to the Lenten season. Thus, Strindberg suggests that Christ's sacrificial death is being seasonally repeated in the lives dramatized. He also hints that the Holy Spirit—the legacy of Christ to man announced on Maundy Thursday—will guide these souls through the Pentecostal season ahead.

Coupled with allusions to the archetypal church seasons is more explicit emphasis on the characters' need to join together the archetypal Old and New Testaments. To Strindberg's characters, this Easter weekend is felt like an intertestamental hiatus between two spiritual dispensations; however, the play eventually makes us feel that such a period of doubt, during which one searches the two testaments for their unity, may be a special dispensation of grace.

Three special features of the play's textual structure upon which I will focus are: Strindberg's realist-symbolist methods of characterization, his unique use of the deus ex machina device, and his selection of specific music as proper to the play's staging, in which he reveals special values in that somber self-examination proper to Easter weekend.

Eric Bentley has found Easter (1900) a work not easy to categorize among Strindberg's traditional groupings of dramas.² It is not clearly naturalistic, like Miss Julie (1888), nor clearly expressionistic, like A Dream Play (1901); in both tone and technique, it is a transitional work. Easter contains a naturalistic plot situation, as multiple disgraces visit a family after their father is imprisoned for theft. It also contains such expressionistic devices as the correlation in the script of weather-changes with modifications among characters' attitudes—mistrust in others bringing dark clouds, and open-hearted love bringing sunshine. This interrelation between weather and characters' personality changes is called the expressionistic Ausstrahlungen des Ichs.³ Another expressionistic device, more marked in Easter, is Strindberg's use of symbolic names.

Strindberg consciously announces this importance of symbolic names in the play when the young girl Eleanora Heyst tells the student Benjamin that he will become her spiritual pupil, and that he is thus properly called Benjamin, because he is “the youngest of [her] friends.”⁴ The Hebrew meaning of the name Benjamin is “son of my right hand.”⁵ But the key symbolic name in this drama is that of the central protagonist—Eleanora's brother and Benjamin's teacher, Elis. His name derives either from the appellation of the prophet Elijah (“God is Jehova”) or from that of Elijah's disciple-prophet Elisha (“God is generous”).⁶ The modern Swedish form of Elijah is Elia, the modern Swedish form of Elisha is Elisa; it is obvious that the name of Elis has a spelling midway between those of the two prophets.⁷

In the play, Elis, as “Elijah” figure, fears, with great starkness of spirit, a “Jehovah” god of wrath; he fears that his father's business associate Lindkvist, justly indignant at the Heyst family for the father's long-ago theft from him, is a modern incarnation of the angry Jehovah. Yet Elis also wishes, like Elisha, to trust God as his “generous” source of New Testament salvation, believing that he has “fallen from grace” (Easter, Act I), and not that grace is an impossibility. Importantly, too, when he quotes the words of Jesus, “Birds have nests and foxes have holes” (Act II), he seems ready to accept his own privation as a mark of his personal identification with Jesus. Still, Elis never reaches a fully quiescent New Testament faith, because he cannot fully accept his need to suffer the guilt and alienation from others caused by his father's crime. He wants the now-impossible: Edenic innocence and tranquility.

Elis's sister Eleanora provides more resolute religious attitudes. She is “in the prison with Father,” she says, and also “in the classroom with [her] brother” (Act I)—suffering along with them, but without that bitterness which Elis and her mother feel toward suffering. Instead, she says, “God has been so good” to her (Act I), even though she evidently has endured a long bout with mental illness. When she tells the student Benjamin that she “embezzled some trust funds” and that her father “was blamed for it and put in prison” (Act I), we should not accept her words literally; she simply, like an expiatory mystic, is taking upon herself the blame for Mr. Heyst's crime, so that she believes those words literally.

Like “Elis,” the name Eleanora also has symbolic value. If derived from its Greek root, “Helen,” the name means “light.” We notice that Eleanora almost always feels the sun or moon shining, even behind very cloudy skies. Yet there also exists a hebrew name “Elinoar,” which means “God is my youth” (Kolatch, pp. 197-98). Eleanora Heyst becomes the “little child” who can “lead” her family toward the spiritual quiescence of a sensed unity between Old and New Testament messages about God (see Isaiah 11:6). In the several scenes in which Eleanora explains the mystical meaning of earthly travail to Benjamin, Eleanora voices a theology of cosmic sorrow and relief which explicates the sufferings of her family meaningfully. Yet the average theatergoer or play-reader will more likely identify with Elis's sweetheart Kristina than with Eleanora. Her name, after all, means “Christian,” or “the anointed one” (Withycombe, p. 65; Kolatch, p. 184). Although she is humanly weak and given to her own fearful tremblings and sometimes a bit like Shakespeare's Polonius with her taste for clichéd slogans, Kristina strives to “anoint” Elis with realization of love's power to make human atonement (at-one-ment) possible. She dares (Act II) to visit Peter, a traitorous student who has plagiarized Elis's academic thesis, and to effect a reconciliation between the two men, convincing Peter to aid Elis in defending the Heysts from further community punishment for their father's crime. She visits Peter even though she knows that it may ruin her relationship with Elis.

The creditor, Lindkvist, eventually joins Kristina in this anointing function, and by doing so, creates for all the characters a sense of wholeness to the Christian experience, so that they can meaningfully unite Old Testament fear of God with New Testament capturing of grace. At first, however, Lindkvist exists as an ominous offstage presence whose very being tests the religious maturity of each character. Mrs. Heyst and Elis usually see him as a vicious symbol of their shame, while Kristina and Eleanora already feel that his impending threat can teach them suffering's value. Lindkvist, after all, is a deus ex machina figure, and his action in the play especially makes clear its thematic bridging of the Biblical testaments. Though at first he appears a godlike condemner bringing “Justice rather than mercy” (Act I), he mentions a “charity that contradicts the law and supersedes it” far earlier in his Act III encounter with Elis than the point at which Elis can sense that “charity” as Lindkvist's own. Lindkvist, indeed, progressively reveals the God of Easter and Pentecost. Even his name means “linden branch,” a leafy summer tree, and thus partly dissociates him from that barren birch branch which he mails Elis early in the play as a symbol of Lenten contrition (Harlock, I, 1193; II, 1292).

In addition to the symbolic names and the deux ex machina figure, Easter contains music which contributes to the play's intertestamental religious atmosphere. Strindberg chooses as preludes to his three acts excerpts from Haydn's Good Friday oratorio The Seven Last Words of Christ. In Haydn's overture to his oratorio, which became the prelude to Strindberg's first act, the mood of ominous foreboding predominates. Throughout the movement, we seem to hear a dominant Jehovah's cry of anger from Mount Ebal. There punitive Israelites, whom Elis in Act I compares to his scornful neighbors, worked Jehovah's wrathful will against the wicked (Deuteronomy 27:13). Haydn's opening A-theme is immediately repeated twice, with little respite from a semi-orchestral interlude of lyricism; on the second repetition, the theme is developed with particular fury. A quieter B-theme later comes to several near-resolutions, but is always broken by reiterations of the A-theme. Then the key opening theme of thunder-notes repeats itself again, before a lengthy developmental section finally quiets the sense of threatening. A balance, at least, is now being achieved between ominousness and peace. Listeners can now sense, over the horizon, that Hebrew mountain of hope for which Elis in Act I longs—Mount Gerizim, the peak from which obedient Israelites received blessing. The light streaming from such an Old Testament mountain surely foreshadows the light of New Testament grace; but, for the Elis whose fears this Haydn music still proclaims, it appears that the clouds of God's wrath will not yet break.

As prelude to the second act of Easter, Strindberg chose Haydn's first choral movement in his oratorio: “Father, forgive them.” Strindberg found Haydn's setting of these words markedly appropriate for the message in this play. Haydn did not give the words of Jesus's plea for man's atonement to a solo voice, but rather to a quartet, suggesting that Jesus's sufferings are shared by all men and women. In the next choral section, he provided the Golgotha watchers' recognition of this truth: “thine only-begotten one, he pleas for sinners.” Thus these transgressors' voices ask mercy for themselves (much as Elis Heyst is doing in this act of Strindberg's drama), and their fortissimo, at the end of the movement, is just as desperate as is Elis's basic mood. Even Eleanora, in this act of the play, begins to lose some of her calm confidence that God is directing her sufferings; she begins to fear destruction with almost as much trepidation as does any earthbound mortal. She had taken a daffodil from an open florist's shop and left money for it, but the money was misplaced and police had traced the flower to her home. As she hears that they have a suspect for the theft, near the end of Act II, she grows fearful, but in the next act the money is found and she is cleared of criminal accusation. But if Eleanora were to participate truly in a Good Friday which culminated the Old Testament, she at least always knew that she needed to share mankind's Old Testament despair at its sin, and to know the resultant suffering. Her serene moments of faith make both her brother and mother question their own bitterness all through the play, but they wait until almost the final curtain before they accept suffering as a necessary part of their own redemption.

As the final act begins, we hear Haydn's setting of Jesus's fifth word from the Cross: “Jesus calls: ‘I thirst!’” Here New Testament light clearly begins to shine, especially as this is the one musical movement (both for Haydn and for Strindberg) in which a solo voice (a gentle tenor) represents Jesus. The symbolic result for Strindberg's drama is the sudden dominance of a single Atoning One, the Jesus of the Cross. Haydn and Strindberg affirm Him as the key to New Testamental (and all subsequent) history. Yet they also suggest that men and women are asked to respond to Jesus's suffering with “wine, which one mixes with gall.” In the play Easter, pity is extended by one man (Lindkvist) to another man (Elis) in the scenes following this Act III prelude. We learn in the Strindberg act which this Haydn music launches that persons like Lindkvist, who are willing to embody in themselves the power of love and to see not only the evil but also the good in their fellows, can help redeem the spirit of hatred in the world. When Lindkvist finally appears onstage, he does not take long before revealing that he is a very real human being, a man who has only temporarily played with the guise of wrathful deity. And he withdraws his claim of a massive debt against the Heyst family, because, as he announces, Mr. Heyst, who later robbed him, had once—long, long ago—befriended him when he was a young and frightened newcomer to the city.

The sort of release from hatred which Lindkvist here illustrates can only begin, we now sense, when individual men and women recognize that they themselves are selfish and others not so bad as they seem. Such insight may, as it drives them to contemplate the culminating event of intertestamental history, force their own pride to a crucifixion. The active expression of that insight into love will fulfill the maundies, or mandates, of Maundy Thursday, the day which begins the one continuous day of Easter Weekend.⁸ Those maundies—which also require the Pentecostal Spirit as their inner teacher—demand that men “love one another” (John 13:34). Through the aid of the Spirit, said the Jesus of Maundy Thursday, men can imitate the love which He showed to His disciples through the foot-washing in the upper room and to all men through the next afternoon's agony on Golgotha. Lent, Easter, and Pentecost—the seasons bridging the two Biblical Testaments—can then become part of inner experience. Love's Pentecostal maundies will unite the Decalogue with Grace, as “a new commandment”—caritas—is born (John 13:34).

On that Holy Saturday when Lindkvist comes to visit him, Elis Heyst must still come to understand those maundies which command Christian love of him. It is his pride, his self-righteousness, which has kept Elis from completing such understanding before, as Lindkvist tells him: “I would force out your pride and your malice” (Act III). Lindkvist's previous threatening letters to Elis, and his dour poses of doom-saying in the Act III confrontation scene, have both been tactics used to awaken Elis from his useless bitterness towards the neighbors who scorned the Heysts. Lindkvist realizes that Elis will not admit that a father's “iniquity” will be “visit[ed] upon the children to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5)—that all are guilty, originally sinful, whether they become actual robbers, as Mr. Heyst did, or not. Lindkvist particularly deplores Elis's bitterness toward the traitorous Peter—a bitterness which, albeit explicable, has led him to avoid all attempts at reconciliation, forcing Kristina to make those attempts. We see Elis start to turn away from his foolish pride as the play's curtain falls, when he comes onstage, holding Kristina's hand in a gesture of tender gratitude. But Easter Day comes offstage, and we know that Elis's continued transformation must bring it to its fulfillment in Pentecostal love.

After those years of religious crisis which he had called his Inferno period, Strindberg by 1900 had conquered his earlier fear (much like Elis Heyst's) that Christ never made Atonement for human sins.⁹ Hence August Strindberg had become able, much like Eleanora (and like Elis at those moments when he senses divine guidance), to acknowledge that God used his own sufferings and even let him expiate others' sins through his pains.

Thus, despite melodramatic touches (Lindvist's repeated stealthy walks past the Heyst home, and his wordless telephone call to them in Act II), and despite a finale scene where Lindkvist may seem a bit like a fairy tale genie, Easter conveys a deep understanding of the necessary Christian tension between penitential works and free grace, resembling that great religious drama of Judaism, The Book of Job. Elis Heyst's neighbors chastise him as mercilessly as did Job's companions, and his God—through the human voices of Eleanora, Kristina, and Lindkvist—tells him, just as resolutely as did Job's God, that self-pity is a folly. But Elis comes to remember that same hope which Job held staunchly even when his ordeal was quite new: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25).

Notes

1. Brita M. E. Mortensen and Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Works (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 135.

2. Eric Bentley, “On Strindberg,” in Six Plays of Strindberg, ed. Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), p. v.

3. Carl Enoch William Leonard Dahlström, Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965; originally published 1930), p. 172.

4. All quotations from Easter are taken from August Strindberg, Three Plays, trans. Peter Watts (New York: Penguin, 1958).

5. Alfred J. Kolatch, Modern English and Hebrew Names (New York: Jonathan David, 1967), p. 22.

6. E. G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 98-99.

7. Walter Harlock, Svensk-Engelsk Ordbok (Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget. 1964), I, 783.

8. The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, ed. S. M. Jackson and G. W. Gilmore (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1959), p. 257. My first source for this centrally important knowledge about the Easter season was the Rev. Robert Duncan, Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

9. Martin Lamm, August Strindberg, trans. and ed. Harry G. Carlson (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), p. 299.