Plays of Confession and Therapy by August Strindberg (review)

386 Comparative Drama Miscellaneous. At page 15 the printer has dropped a line and doubled another. Pages 17-18: The demolition of Allardyce Nicoll’s picture of the audience makes an odd conclusion to the audience chapter. Nicoll’s account has not been taken seriously for many years. Holland’s readiness to cite Foote (b. 1720) and other mid-eighteenth-century authors about acting is unsettling when the late seventeenth century is at issue— e.g., page 62. The failure of Part 3 of Don Quixote seems to me more prob­ ably a matter of a weak script rather than a poor cast (page 69). Holland concludes that The Plain-Dealer “has taught the audience that judgement is a fraud, that there are few means by which we can guaran­ tee knowledge and none at all by which we can talk about it” (page 202). This seems to me an intelligent and defensible reading—but we can hardly say that the play has actually worked this way for many readers or spectators. The discussion of The Old Batchelour (pages 207ff) skirts a significant point: if Hodges is correct, Congreve drafted the play before he moved to London and became familiar with the United Company actors. The assumption that the reference to “One falling Adam, and one tempted Eve” in the prologue to Love for Love refers to Joseph Williams and Susanna Mountfort-Verbruggen is not necessarily wrong, but Holland might have reflected on the possibility that the male was John Verbruggen rather than Williams (page 225). In a book as detailed and factual as this one some errors and mis­ statements are inevitable. I mean this set of sample quibbles to suggest the need for some wariness on the part of the user about Holland’s propensity for dogmatic assertion, not to imply lack of overall worth. I find the book as a whole valuable for its author’s detailed investigation of play texts from a fresh and useful vantage point. A book not genuinely erudite and full of provocative commentary would not be worth such rigorous scrutiny. I sometimes disagree with Mr. Holland’s interpreta­ tions, but on the whole I have found even my disagreements fruitful. Holland’s approach to Congreve is certainly a welcome change from the “close readings” of texts popular in the last quarter century, especially in his insistence upon theatrical possibilities. All disagreements and par­ ticular objections notwithstanding, The Ornament of Action deserves to be influential for its intelligent and original use of casts and context. ROBERT D. HUME The Pennsylvania State University August Strindberg. Plays of Confession and Therapy, trans. Walter John­ son. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Pp. 252. $18.50. The Washington Strindberg has consolidated Walter Johnson’s repu­ tation as one of the leading American Strindberg scholars. This, the tenth volume of play translations in that series, achieves the same high level of authoritativeness in an attractive format as the earlier ones. Johnson, a longtime managing editor of Scandinavian Studies, has been publishing on Sweden’s greatest dramatist for forty years; he has written, Reviews 387 for example, Strindberg and the Historical Drama and the Twayne World Authors Series volume on August Strindberg. Plays of Confession and Therapy is an apt title for To Damascus I, II, and III, since this trilogy is a dramatization of Strindberg’s own curative spiritual journey toward self-discovery during his harrowing “Inferno period.” The writing of these three full-length plays over a four-year period following his 1894-97 Inferno experience was a form of self­ therapy, like the journal he kept during the crisis period itself. Strindberg considered his own conversion (from agnosticism to a personal brand of Christian belief) akin to the miraculous conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Johnson’s essays on the plays elucidate a continual interplay in them between external reality and man’s inner turmoil, and hint at the seminal importance of it to all of modem drama. Johnson has a reputation for accuracy as a translator, even adhering whenever possible to the original punctuation. Happily, this meticulous­ ness does not sacrifice clarity or readability, and Johnson manages “to present an American...