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    Plays by August Strindberg: Creditors. Pariah.
    Plays by August Strindberg: Creditors. Pariah.
    Plays by August Strindberg: Creditors. Pariah.
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Plays by August Strindberg: Creditors. Pariah.

    By Edwin Bjorkman and August Strindberg

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateDec 1, 1976
    Plays by August Strindberg: Creditors. Pariah.

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    Reviews for Plays by August Strindberg

    3.5/5

    147 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Tight, complex, brilliant, disturbing. Good theatre.
    • 4/5
      A tragedy in the traditional sense, despite Strindberg's being a modern playwright. I didn't have much sympathy for the title character at first... She makes some very foolish choices under the influence of alcohol and hormones which have terrible consequences. My initial reaction was 'how could she be so stupid?' but as I thought about the play I realized that while her actions were stupid, they were also not uncommon (especially for someone in late teens/early twenties). One aspect of Miss Julia's behaviour that I really didn't like was when she kept asking the manservant Jean to tell her what to do. Perhaps that rang true in 1888 but it didn't seem to fit in with her character.
    • 3/5
      I had to read it for my Scandinavian Historical and Cultural Topics class, thought it was alright I guess? Not a huge fan of Strindberg.
    • 3/5
      I would've rated this 1.5 stars last night as I finished and turned off the light. I didn't feel great, was disappointed with a classical program on NPR and found this play a touch hysterical. During the cold darkness of early morning I reflected on some of the subtle touches, the yellow label and the ill fated bird. The condensed nature of the action was difficult to believe. The pastoral passages by comparison were beautiful.

      That said I would afford the Author's Preface five stars as a validation of Naturalism. Strindberg is wonderful in his exposition.

      I am still not a fan of the play but would read it again.
    • 1/5
      Early this morning I finished reading August Strindberg's 1888 play, 'Miss Julie'. I was seriously unimpressed. The edition I read (Dover Thrift Editions) included the author's preface to the play, which I found maddeningly narrow-minded and blunt to the point of rudeness. In his preface, Strindberg castigates many things, but particularly the narrow minds and dull intellect of most theatre-goers, and the eponymous protagonist of the book, whose lusts and weaknesses stem from her "man-hating half-woman" character. Strindberg speaks with praise about the valet, Jean, and about this servant's superiority, which he is granted because "he is a man. Sexually he is the aristocrat because of his male strength, his more finely developed senses, and his capacity for taking the initiative". Irritated beyond belief after eleven pages of condescending twaddle, I was in no good mood, and my reading of the play itself did not dispel the dislike of Strindberg that I gained while reading the preface. Miss Julie and her actions are typical of stories even to this day: men make sexual conquests while women are tramps. The contempt with which Jean treats Julie, and the callousness he displays towards the woman to whom he is all but engaged, show not a man of superior senses, but a man abased by lust and a desire to control others for his own pleasure. I did not enjoy this play and won't be reading Strindberg again. The author's condescension towards those who read his plays make me anxious to remove myself from that number.

    Book preview

    Plays by August Strindberg - Edwin Bjorkman

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Creditors; Pariah, by August Strindberg

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Creditors; Pariah (2 plays)

    Author: August Strindberg

    Translator: Edwin Bjorkman

    Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5053] This file was first posted on April 11, 2002 Last Updated: May 5, 2013

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CREDITORS; PARIAH ***

    Produced by Nicole Apostola, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

    CREDITORS and PARIAH

    Two Plays

    By August Strindberg

    Translated From The Swedish, With Introductions By Edwin Bjorkman

    CREDITORS

    INTRODUCTION

    This is one of the three plays which Strindberg placed at the head of his dramatic production during the middle ultra-naturalistic period, the other two being The Father and Miss Julia. It is, in many ways, one of the strongest he ever produced. Its rarely excelled unity of construction, its tremendous dramatic tension, and its wonderful psychological analysis combine to make it a masterpiece.

    In Swedish its name is Fordringsagare. This indefinite form may be either singular or plural, but it is rarely used except as a plural. And the play itself makes it perfectly clear that the proper translation of its title is Creditors, for under this aspect appear both the former and the present husband of Tekla. One of the main objects of the play is to reveal her indebtedness first to one and then to the other of these men, while all the time she is posing as a person of original gifts.

    I have little doubt that Strindberg, at the time he wrote this play—and bear in mind that this happened only a year before he finally decided to free himself from an impossible marriage by an appeal to the law—believed Tekla to be fairly representative of womanhood in general. The utter unreasonableness of such a view need hardly be pointed out, and I shall waste no time on it. A question more worthy of discussion is whether the figure of Tekla be true to life merely as the picture of a personality—as one out of numerous imaginable variations on a type decided not by sex but by faculties and qualities. And the same question may well be raised in regard to the two men, both of whom are evidently intended to win our sympathy: one as the victim of a fate stronger than himself, and the other as the conqueror of adverse and humiliating circumstances.

    Personally, I am inclined to doubt whether a Tekla can be found in the flesh—and even if found, she might seem too exceptional to gain acceptance as a real individuality. It must be remembered, however, that, in spite of his avowed realism, Strindberg did not draw his men and women in the spirit generally designated as impressionistic; that is, with the idea that they might step straight from his pages into life and there win recognition as human beings of familiar aspect. His realism is always mixed with idealism; his figures are always doctored, so to speak. And they have been thus treated in order to enable their creator to drive home the particular truth he is just then concerned with.

    Consciously or unconsciously he sought to produce what may be designated as pure cultures of certain human qualities. But these he took great pains to arrange in their proper psychological settings, for mental and moral qualities, like everything else, run in groups that are more or less harmonious, if not exactly homogeneous. The man with a single quality, like Moliere's Harpagon, was much too primitive and crude for Strindberg's art, as he himself rightly asserted in his preface to Miss Julia. When he wanted to draw the genius of greed, so to speak, he did it by setting it in the midst of related qualities of a kind most likely to be attracted by it.

    Tekla is such a pure culture of a group of naturally correlated mental and moral qualities and functions and tendencies—of a personality built up logically around a dominant central note. There are within all of us many personalities, some of which remain for ever potentialities. But it is conceivable that any one of them, under circumstances different from those in which we have been living, might have developed into its severely logical consequence—or, if you please, into a human being that would be held abnormal if actually encountered.

    This is exactly what Strindberg seems to have done time and again, both in his middle and final periods, in his novels as well as in his plays. In all of us a Tekla, an Adolph, a Gustav—or a Jean and a Miss Julia—lie more or less dormant. And if we search our souls unsparingly, I fear the result can only be an admission that—had the needed set of circumstances been provided—we might have come unpleasantly close to one of those Strindbergian creatures which we are now inclined to reject as unhuman.

    Here we have the secret of what I believe to be the great Swedish dramatist's strongest hold on our interest. How could it otherwise happen that so many critics, of such widely differing temperaments, have recorded identical feelings as springing from a study of his work: on one side an active resentment, a keen unwillingness to be interested; on the other, an attraction that would not be denied in spite of resolute resistance to it! For Strindberg DOES hold us, even when we regret his power of doing so. And no one familiar with the conclusions of modern psychology could imagine such a paradox possible did not the object of our sorely divided feelings provide us with something that our minds instinctively recognise as true to life in some way, and for that reason valuable to the art of living.

    There are so many ways of presenting truth. Strindberg's is only one of them—and not the one commonly employed nowadays. Its main fault lies perhaps in being too intellectual, too abstract. For while Strindberg was intensely emotional, and while this fact colours all his writings, he could only express himself through his reason. An emotion that would move another man to murder would precipitate Strindberg into merciless analysis of his own or somebody else's mental and moral make-up. At any rate, I do not proclaim his way of presenting truth as the best one of all available. But I suspect that this decidedly strange way of Strindberg's—resulting in such repulsively superior beings as Gustav, or in such grievously inferior ones as Adolph—may come nearer the temper and needs of the future than do the ways of much more plausible writers. This does not need to imply that the future will imitate Strindberg. But it may ascertain what he aimed at doing, and then do it with a degree of perfection which he, the pioneer, could never hope to attain.

    CREDITORS

    A TRAGICOMEDY

    1889

    PERSONS

    TEKLA

    ADOLPH, her husband, a painter

    GUSTAV, her divorced husband, a high-school teacher (who is travelling under an assumed name)

    SCENE

    (A parlor in a summer hotel on the sea-shore. The rear wall has a door opening on a veranda, beyond which is seen a landscape. To the right of the door stands a table with newspapers on it. There is a chair on the left side of the stage. To the right of the table stands a sofa. A door on the right leads to an adjoining room.)

    (ADOLPH and GUSTAV, the latter seated on the sofa by the table to the right.)

    ADOLPH. [At work on a wax figure on a miniature modelling stand; his crutches are placed beside

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