On Maeterlinck Reading Shakespeare

On Maeterlinck Reading Shakespeare MICHAEL HAYS The notion of linking Maeterlinck with Shakespeare is hardly a new one. It might even be said that this idea was an integral part of Maeterlinck's earliest reception as a dramatist. Reviewing a copy of his first play, La Princesse Maleine (1889),1 Octave Mirbeau, after proclaiming the work a masterpiece and the author immortal, concluded his panegyric with the following lines: "In short, M. Maurice Maeterlinck has given us the work of this age most full of genius, the most extraordinary and most simple as well, comparable and - shall I dare say it? - superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare...2 On the other hand, when Maeterlinck's friend Gerard Harry submitted his English translation of the play to Heinemann's, the reader for that publishing house described the playas the most appalling plagiarism of Shakespeare he had ever seen (Halls, p. 26). In response to Mirbeau's extravagant praise, and no doubt in order to defend himself against further accusations of plagiarism, Maeterlinck quickly began referring to the playas a mere "Shakespitrerie," thus admitting his use of Shakespeare and a desire to put this association behind him.' Even acursory examination of La Prillcesse Maleine seems to confinn these initial suggestions of a connection between Maeterlinck's work and that of Shakespeare - particularly Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. The play opens in the courtyard of a castle at the approach of midnight. Two officers of the watch discuss the evil portents visible in the heavens. A beautiful young princess, Maleine, though not yet fifteen, is loved by the hero, Prince Hjalmar. She dies at the hands of the lecherous and power-hungry Queen Anne, who has something of Gertrude, but more of Lady Macbeth, about her. During a scene reminiscent ofthe banquet in Macbeth, here set at the entry to a chapel, the king is assaulted by sights and sounds that lead him to a mad revelation of his part in the murder. Atthe end of the play, Hjalmar kills not the king, but the queen, and then dies by his own hand. Other "echoes" can be found in the names of the 50 MICHAEL HAYS characters: Hjalmar (Hamlet); the officer of the watch, Vanox (Lennox in Macbeth); Marcellus, here Maleine's father, an officer in Hamlet;and Angus, the Horatio-like friend of Hjalmar, who figures as a nobleman in Macbeth. There are also the multiple locations and interspersing of characters from the lower classes that could be called Shakespearean. This by itself might be sufficient evidence for critics who want to note the "influence" of Shakespeare on Maeterlinck, but there is more. In the first of his publications, a volume of poetry entitled Serres chaudes (1889), Maeterlinck opens with an epigraph drawn from Macbeth (IV, i): "And in his hand a glass which shows us many more" (in English in Maeterlinck's text). Funhermore, Maeterlinck himself informed his German translator that he had drawn on one of Ophelia's songs for the poem "Et s'it revenait un joUr.,,4 But before we simply fall in with those critics who have patiently noted such "influences" one after the other,S perhaps we should pause and ask some questions about this term. Such questions are, in fact, one of the purposes of. this essay. If J began with a rather summary rehearsal of the format found in many influence studies, it was in order to draw attention to the usual practice in such works. What is most striking about the critical responses to Maeterlinck is precisely the manner in which they manage to discuss literary forebears and "influence" without ever questioning their own presuppositions: Maeterlinck relies on others (Shakespeare, Rossetti , Poe, Carlyle, Novalis, Emerson, etc.) whose presence is "discovered" in his work and who are therefore cited as the masters from whom the pupil has acquired his ideas as well as much of his technique. Each ofthese "influences" is assumed to be the "origin," in the sense of source as well as agent, for the transmission into our playwright of notions that seem to have no existence or history outside ofthis connection. Each ofthe "major" influences is...