Strindberg And The New Poetics

Abstract

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, in An Apology for Poetry, complained of mongrel tragi-comedies with their ludicrous mixture of horn-pipes and funerals. In one sense, Sidney's complaint seems old-fashioned, a classical insistence on purity of genre, limited by the dramas available at the time-a time when "absurd" was a synonym for bad. But Sidney was doing more than mouthing contemporary standards; he was focusing upon a problem that must concern literary critics and directors in any age. A director may be most interested in what will please now; a critic may be interested in what will please many and please long; both need in some manner to examine the demands of an audience. Sidney raises this question: to what degree can comedy and tragedy, humor and pathos, be mixed without leaving the audience in a muddle; to what degree is variety possible? Dryden and Dr. Johnson, with the example of Shakespeare before them, defended a mixed drama. Dryden, a practicing playwright, was cautious: variety, because it was pleasurable, he welcomed, provided it was well-ordered; humorous interludes were appropriate in tragedy, provided they were interludes, presented as relief from or contrast to the predominant tragic tone. Johnson, well-read, but seldom a theater-goer, defended the mingled drama because it mirrored "the course of the world, in which ... at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend." Such drama exhibited "the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow." But a sad succession of eighteenth-century "sentimental comedies"-where the dramatist in trying to satisfy all emotions ended in satisfying few or none-testified to the dangerous cohabitation of humor and pathos; David Garrick, faced with this bastard species, asked the dramatist and the audience to make up their minds: "Are you for dimples, ladies, or for tears?"