Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (review)

Patrick McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 270 pages.

Described by one critic as "superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare," (15) Maurice Maeterlinck's plays met with immense success in their time. This author, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911, is today rather neglected, and Patrick McGuinness's study is a welcome addition to the slim corpus of recent work on Maeterlinck. Indeed, as McGuinness himself rightly points out, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre is the first full-length study in English to appear in over a decade. McGuinness's introduction points out the complexity of many issues surrounding Maeterlinck's relationship to the theater and to Symbolism, comparing Maeterlinck himself to the Golo figure of Proust's magic lantern, who takes on the shape of every object onto which he is projected, becoming difficult to disentangle from the supporting ossature. The remainder of the book is divided roughly in half: the first three chapters are devoted to the establishment of literary and historical context; the last three offer close readings of specific Maeterlinckian texts.

In the first chapter, McGuinness begins to sketch out the movement by which Maeterlinck comes full circle, proceeding from a vision of theater as a metaphor to describe dreams to the reverse: dreaming as a metaphor for theater. He also introduces various terminology used by Maeterlinck to discuss his theater and to theorize, and suggests that early prose and poetic works by Maeterlinck already contain elements that will later be brought to the forefront in his dramatic writings. McGuinness is correct in identifying these elements present in nondramatic forms of writing; however, their significance becomes much clearer after his detailed analyses of the dramatic texts in his subsequent chapters. Similarly, the Maeterlinckian vocabulary takes on meaning when it is put into context, and its use demonstrated in a later examination of the plays.

In the second chapter, McGuinness studies the relation of Maeterlinck's first play, La Princesse Maleine, to the Symbolist movement, paying particular attention to the voices of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam as a precursor for whom theatrical conventions were still serving a purpose, and of Camille Mauclair, into whose lofty vision of a theater of heroism, poetic language and idealism Maeterlinck could not fit. McGuinness does a fine job of showing how, from the eclecticism of the Symbolists' theater and theoretical musings, certain common principles emerge, principles concerning freedom from the dictates of form, plot, and action, as well as an antagonism to Naturalist playwrights' programmatic dramas. Symbolist theater aimed to reveal the ordinarily hidden inner life common to all of humanity; to "re-create the 'universal' drama of the interior self" (75). At certain points, McGuinness appears to struggle with the organization of this chapter; for instance, he is led to describe a scene of extreme violence in La Princesse Maleine, and the clear Jacobean influence informing it, twice within ten pages, in very similar terms (78, 87). His discussion of the points at which Maeterlinck more closely resembles a playwright such as John Ford rather than the Elizabethans to which he is often compared (most notably, Shakespeare) remains insightful nonetheless.

The following chapter charts the shift in Maeterlinck's thinking, from an anti-performance stance frequently expressed by his Symbolist colleagues (and by Mallarmé in particular) to the incorporation of his objections into a theory of performance, one in which the perceived conflict between the written page and the stage becomes productive: he "uses the ideal of reading not as a basis for abolishing performance, but for reinventing it" (124). The initial objection goes as follows: performance is dangerous in that the erstwhile reader, now become a spectator, loses the possibility of exercising his creative imagination, and is instead subject to the will of the director and actors; the staging that takes place in the reader's mind is replaced by a physical space...