Strindberg and the Danse Macabre

STRINDBERG AND THE DANSE MACABRE \VHILE STRINDBERG REMAINED as fascinated as ever by his own time after his Inferno years of 1894 to 1897, he became more intensely interested than ever before in the late Middle Ages as well. That two-fold interest helped lead to many developments, among them his creation of new dramatic techniques through (1) the extension of his superb realistic-naturalistic technical practices of the pre-Inferno period, (2) the transformation of medieval dramatic ideas and devices into techniques that became highly Strindbergian, and (3) the addition of modern technical elements that were essentially his own. All three matters, taken together, are frequently and loosely' spoken of as e}.:pressionistic by most scholars and critics. Strindberg's intensified post-Inferno interest in the Middle Ages stemmed bOtll from his renewed interest in history and his so-called conversion. The latter led to increased attention to Biblical morality and religious faith and to a concern with the medieval mystery and morality plays throughout the post-Inferno years. It is significant that all the major historical plays except Master Olof were written after 1897; all of them are concerned in more ways than one with morality. It is equally significant that all his other post-Inferno plays are in technique or thought or both related in varying degrees to the medieval drama. The three Damascus plays, for example, are to an appreciable extent, adaptations of the techniques of such morality plays as Everyman. Advent and Easter, to cite two more examples, are highly reminiscent of both the morality and mystery plays. Parallels to the medieval stress on life as a pilgrimage appear again and again in the post-Inferno plays, historical and non-historical. In all these plays there are, moreover , parallels to the Biblically-inspired medieval concern with human nature, the relationship between the individual and what Strindberg calls the Eternal One, and the moral problems implicit in both. There is in addition to all this sort of thing Strindberg's amazing psychological insight into the tragic tensions within modem man and his uncanny ability to bring those tensions into tangible expression for the stage. The companion plays, The Dance of Death I and The Dance of Death II (1901), received a name that is ultimately medieval in its implications, and they have in them such elements as an emphasis on death, the vampire motive, and the repetition of the pattern of life generation after generation, which were of decided concern to the Middle Ages. Yet the two plays are as modem and contemporary as 8 1960 STRINDBERG AND THE DANSE MACABRE 9 any plays could be. Strindberg had the genius for taking what he needed by way of inspiration and detail and transforming what he received into something peculiarly his own and always subtly different from anything he had done before. What he did in The Dance of Death plays illustrates all this. The story that Strindberg tells in The Dance of Death I is the story of a modem marital hell created by a frustrated army captain stationed on an island called Little Hell and by his equally frustrated ex-actress wife. The story he tells in The Dance of Death II is of the same captain, now retired and for the first time really free to go to work as a vampire. What the late Middle Ages had for Strindberg by way of inspiration and detail for the dramatization of these stories can easily be demonstrated. Medieval Europeans had good reasons for being aware of death as something ugly, horrible and gruesome. Plague, war, disease, disaster and want provided constant visible evidence that the priests were quite right in insisting that not only was Death taking neighbors, friends, and relatives but might at any moment take the individual himself. Both the morality and the mystery plays were used, moreover , by the church to warn medieval people about their frequently frantic attempts to conceal the macabre realities from themselves by escaping into worldly pleasures. Recorded on thousands of paintings (murals, frescoes, oils, and water colors), engravings, and woodcuts and in many sCl,llptures, poems, sermons, and plays was the so-called Dance of Death or...