Miss Julie and Other Plays

by August Strindberg

Overview

This version of Miss Julie and Other Plays includes Miss Julie, The Creditor, The Stronger Woman, Motherly Love, Paria, and Simoon.

Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie) is a naturalistic play written in 1888 by August Strindberg dealing with class, love, lust, the battle of the sexes, and the interaction among them. Set on a midsummer night of 1874, on the estate of a Count in Sweden, the young woman of the title, attempting to escape an existence cramped by social mores and have a little fun, dances at the servants' annual midsummer party, where she is drawn to a senior servant, a footman named Jean, who is particularly well-traveled, well-mannered and well-read. The action takes place in the kitchen of Miss Julie's father's manor; here Jean's fiancée, a servant named Christine, cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and Miss Julie talk.

The plot is primarily concerned with power in its various forms. Miss Julie has power over Jean because she is upper-class. Jean has power over Miss Julie because he is male and uninhibited by aristocratic values. The count, Miss Julie's father (an unseen character), has power over both of them since he is a nobleman, an employer, and a father.

On this night, behavior between Miss Julie and Jean which was previously a flirtatious contest for power rapidly escalates to a love relationship—or is it just lust?—that is fully consummated. Over the course of the play, Miss Julie and Jean battle for control, which swings back and forth between them until Jean convinces her that the only way to escape her predicament is to commit suicide.

Creditors (Swedish: Fordringsägare) is a naturalistic tragicomedy. It was written in Swedish during August and September 1888 in Denmark. It was first published in Danish in February 1889 and appeared in Swedish in 1890. It premièred at the Dagmar Theatre in Copenhagen in March 1889. It is seen as one of Strindberg's most powerful plays. Strindberg himself, writing in 1892, described it as his "most mature work."

The depressed Adolf is visited by his new friend Gustav. Adolf consults with him on what to do about his wife Tekla, who toys with him all the time. He suspects her of infidelity, the way she runs about at night. What he doesn't know is that Gustav once was married to Tekla and now has come, like a creditor, to take her back. Gustav intends this to happen by making Adolf understand that he must leave Tekla.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015041798
Publisher:	Balefire Publishing
Publication date:	08/29/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	167
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.

In Sweden Strindberg is both known as a novelist and a playwright, but in most other countries he is almost only known as a playwright.

The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, at the age of 32, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that–-building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play — responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterization replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasised. Strindberg modelled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.