Strindberg's Cosmos in A Dream Play: Medieval or Modern

Strindberg's Cosmos in A Dream Play: Medieval or Modern Göran Stockenström To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand, And Eternity in an Hour. —from William Blake, Auguries of Innocence Love as a flower, death through fire and death through water, the hierarchy of the four elements. ... In the canonical play of dramatic modernism ancient conceptions recur with renewed vitality. Much of this Shakespeare could have had an easier time to understand than we, the Shakespeare that makes Cleopatra enter the realm of death with the following words, which could also have been part of A Dream Play: "I am fire and air, the other elements I give to baser life."1 Thus Sven Delblanc points to the seeming paradox of Strindberg 's A Dream Play, "the precursor of all modernity" in the theater, and its ancient world picture with roots extending back to the Middle Ages and beyond.2 Shakespeare's beautiful words express Cleopatra's desire to be united with her beloved Antony in death, but the playwright's essentially medieval notion of the cosmos as a Chain of Being representing the hidden orderedness of all things in hierarchies—from the Creator, Seraphim and Cherubim, and Powers to human beings and the simple mussel, from the Sun to the sublunar world, from king to slave, from gold to lead—no longer has any intrinsic meaning to a modern audience beyond the poetry. Shakespeare's words expressed a view of cosmos that was taken for granted by the Elizabethans. They all knew that Cleopatra's death invoked the final separation of the higher and the baser elements, fire and air going upwards, and the baser elements, water and earth going downwards, the ultimate redemption out of creatural suffering. Is Strindberg in A 72 Göran Stockenström73 Dream Play using the same notion of the cosmos but in the spirit of modernity in order to express through innovation a new historical situation, or is he sharing Shakespeare's view of an unus mundus where everything in the created universe existed in absolute form in the mind of God? Is Strindberg's mysterious symbolism and revolutionary stagecraft in A Dream Play an eclectic aestheticism drawing upon older notions and ideas, or is he part of the philosophia perennis of antiquity and medieval times which presupposed the primordial bond between nature and the divine? The questions raised by Delblanc's observations concerning the nature and character of Strindberg's "modernism" can be illustrated by a close reading of key scenes from A Dream Play as a wedge into his speculations about the cosmos— modern or medieval? The original title for A Dream Play was "The Growing Castle," which is announced in the first scene of the original manuscript of the play, the "Prologue" being added at a considerably later time.3 The setting presents the central theme of the play: "The backdrop shows a forest of gigantic hollyhocks in bloom: white, pink, crimson, yellow-sulphur, and violet. Above this rises the gilded roof of a castle with a flowerbud similar to a corona at the top. Under the walls of the castle lie piles of straw covering the stable-muck" (SS, XXXVI, 221). After the curtain rises, the Glazier and the Daughter note that the flowerbud resembling a crown has not blossomed even though the season is the middle of the summer. The play concludes, however , with the bud bursting into a giant chrysanthemum as the castle burns. Thus it seems that all that occurs from the beginning to the end happens between these two instants in the blooming of the flower. Within the frame of this "now" is presented the panorama of life—both that of the individual and the world. The castle as a representation of human life grows out of the earth symbolizing man's bondage in the world of matter, striving like the chrysanthemum, the sacred "golden" flower of the East, to blossom and die, and signifying the hope of redemption from suffering.4 The flower, striving to rise into the air, is associated with fall as a...