The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
August Strindberg · a naturalistic tragedy in one act, played without an interval · three speaking roles and one set · written in the summer of 1888 and published in Stockholm by Joseph Seligmann, November 1888, with the author’s Preface · scored on Strindberg’s uncut Swedish text, read from knowledge, with Michael Robinson’s translation (1998) and Michael Meyer’s (1964) for sense; no text in hand, and no translation quoted
Mode
Naturalistic tragedy in one act; a chamber drama of sex and class, with a folk saturnalia played across it
Mythos
The midsummer night when order is suspended and its morning; the Fall; the one who longs to fall and the one who longs to climb; the absent father present as a god in boots and a bell
Phase
One night in near real time: the dancing of Midsummer Eve, a seduction offstage, the plans and quarrels of the small hours, and sunrise
Presentation
Drama; one act without an interval, one set, three speaking roles, a chorus of farm people, a mime and a dance in place of an act break, the Count never seen
Register
From flirtation, farce and the peasants’ mocking song to accounting, contempt, a slaughtered bird and a trance at dawn
Scale
Three people, one kitchen, one night; a great house above them and its estate around them, a class in decline and a new man rising
Governing Proposition
On Midsummer Eve the Count’s daughter comes down to the kitchen, dances with her father’s valet and goes with him to his room; by morning neither can undo it, and when the bell rings from upstairs he becomes a servant again and she goes out with his razor. The wager of the play is that desire between unequal people is a struggle for power, that class and sex can each invert the other for one night and not for longer, and that only a single act with no interval, kept in the servants’ room, can make the audience live that night without a way out of it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Fröken Julie. Ett naturalistiskt sorgespel”
(Miss Julie. A naturalistic tragedy). Strindberg wrote it in the summer of 1888 at Skovlyst, near Copenhagen, and named it twice in its title: after the woman at its centre, and after the programme it meant to fulfil. Joseph Seligmann published it in Stockholm in November 1888, with a Preface in which the author explained what he had done and why. Bonnier, Strindberg’s publisher, had refused it. Seligmann printed it, but cut and softened passages without Strindberg’s consent, and the Danish censor stopped its public premiere.
The manuscript survived, and the uncut text is printed in the Swedish national edition, the Samlade Verk. That text is the play scored here: a text for performance, entire. The first edition’s cuts belong to its history, not to its form. The Preface belongs to its history too. It is a statement of method and of theory, and it is weighed as part of what the play did in its field; nothing in it is credited to the play’s dialogue or its scenes.
There is one act, played without an interval, and one set: the Count’s kitchen, set at an angle to the audience, on Midsummer Eve. Three people speak. Julie, the Count’s daughter, is twenty-five; Jean, his valet, is thirty; Kristin, the cook, is thirty-five. A chorus of farm people sings and dances. The Count never appears. He is present only as his boots, his bell and the speaking tube, and he is present from beginning to end.
Movement II
The play begins with a dance it does not show. The farm people are dancing offstage, and Julie is reported before she enters: the audience knows her first as the servants know her, from what is said of her in the kitchen. On the floor stand the Count’s boots, which Jean is to black. They are the social order in one object, and they will be on the floor when the play ends.
Kristin is cooking. What she cooks is a foul brew for Julie’s bitch Diana, to rid her of the litter she got by the gatekeeper’s pug. An animal’s misalliance is set on the stove before the human one has happened, and no one in the kitchen needs to remark on the likeness. Julie drinks beer; Jean drinks wine. In a sip, each has taken the other’s class.
Julie comes down and commands Jean to dance with her. A cinder lodges in his eye. He kisses her shoe. The scenes turn on such gestures rather than on speeches, and the dialogue is made to sound unmade: it drifts, it repeats, it breaks off, as talk does between people who are testing how far they may go.
Movement III
Each tells a dream. Julie dreams that she is on top of a pillar and longs to fall. Jean dreams that he is at the foot of a tall tree and longs to climb to the golden eggs in the nest. The dreams are the archetype in plain sight, and the play is the night in which the two of them pass each other, one going down and one going up. The dreamers say what their dreams mean, which is the one point at which the myth is told rather than built.
Jean tells a story of his childhood: how as a boy he crawled through the privy into the Count’s garden and saw her among the roses, and how he lay among elder blossoms in an oat bin and wanted to die for love of her. It is half true and half lie; it is the strangest and most lyrical thing in the play, and it is a seduction. The servant’s memory of wanting is a means of getting.
Then the farm people come into the kitchen, singing a song that mocks the mistress, and Julie and Jean go into his room. The stage is empty of the two people the song is about. The peasants dance, and the seduction happens behind the door, and the audience stands where the servants stand, outside, hearing the song. With Kristin’s mime, this dance takes the place of an act break; the Preface explains why. There is no interval in which anyone could recover.
Movement IV
When they come out, nothing can be undone. Jean has plans: they will keep a hotel at Lake Como. The plans need money. The new man rises as the old house sinks, and the two of them begin to trade contempt, each turning on the other the hierarchy that the night had reversed. A few of these turns run longer than the drama needs.
Julie tells how she was made. Her mother raised her against her sex, and her father raised her against her class; there was a house that burned, and money, and a revenge. The account comes in a block, and it narrates what the rest of the play shows; it is the one passage where the form turns into a container. But what it narrates holds: her self-destruction did not begin tonight, and it was made by others before it was chosen by her.
Then the greenfinch: Jean beheads it on the chopping block, the bird killed for the flight. Over its blood she wishes to see his brains on the block and his whole sex drowned in blood. It is the height of the play, and it is dreadful. Kristin, with her churchgoing piety, has a Sunday sermon of her own: that the first shall be last. The cook’s piety is the third voice in the kitchen, and the play does not say whether it is the play’s judgement or its satire.
Movement V
The sun is up. The bell rings from upstairs. Jean, who was planning a hotel, puts on his livery coat and is a lackey again; he cannot stand straight before the boots. The servant carried the master inside him all night, and the master has only to ring.
Julie asks Jean to command her, as if she were asleep, and he gives the order. The razor lies on the table. She takes it and goes out into the morning. The night is over on the stage as it is over in her, and the form has given no one, in the house or in the audience, a moment in which to step out of it.
Well over a century of stagings has not settled what the close means: who has won, whether Jean is master or still servant, whether Julie goes out to die or only goes out, whether the play endorses the misogyny of its Preface or exposes it. Each age has moved the night somewhere else: Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie to the night of Labour’s victory in 1945, Yaël Farber’s Mies Julie to South Africa after apartheid, Katie Mitchell’s Fräulein Julie to Kristin’s side of the room.
Act III · The Twelve
Three people, one room, one night, no interval: each exchange tightens the next, and the subtractive test finds little to take. Julie’s command to dance, the cinder in Jean’s eye, his story of the boy who crawled through the privy and saw her in the rose garden, the two dreams, the seduction offstage, the plans for a hotel at Lake Como, the money, the greenfinch, the bell and the razor: remove one and a link in the necessity breaks. Even Kristin’s mime, which looks like a pause, is the play’s clock. What could go: part of Julie’s long account of how her mother raised her, which narrates what the play elsewhere shows, and a few turns late on where the contempt runs longer than the drama needs.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: desire between unequal people is a struggle for power; class and sex are each a hierarchy that the other can invert for one night and not undo; and the servant carries the master inside him. Jean can plan a hotel on Lake Como, but when the bell rings he puts on his livery coat and is a lackey again. The Count’s boots on the floor are the social order in one object. Julie’s self-destruction is shown as made, by a mother who raised her against her sex and a father who raised her against her class. Held below the top because part of the disclosure is the Preface’s theory of hereditary degeneration, which is not true and which the play at moments enacts.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is dreadful and mostly late. The summit: Jean beheading the greenfinch on the chopping block, and Julie over its blood wishing his whole sex drowned in it; then the bell, Jean’s collapse into servility, and the close, where Julie asks to be commanded as if she were asleep and goes out into the morning with the razor. Earlier there is the strange lyric height of the two dreams, and Jean’s childhood memory, half true and half lie, of wanting to die for love among elder blossoms in an oat bin. Between these the register is kept deliberately low: flirtation, quarrel, accounting. A play of this pressure rises less often than it threatens to, and frequency holds the axis here.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built. Midsummer Eve is the saturnalia, the night when order is suspended, when the mistress dances with the servant and the farm people mock her in song; the play is built on that inversion and on its morning, when order returns with the sunrise and the Count. The two dreams are the archetype in plain sight and load-bearing: she on a pillar longing to fall, he at the foot of a tree longing to climb to the golden eggs in the nest, and the play is the night in which they pass each other. The Fall stands behind it, and the bird killed for the flight, and the father as an absent god. Held a step down because the dreamers say their dreams’ meaning aloud.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the European stage of the 1880s: the well-made play, Ibsen’s prose drama in several acts, and Zola’s call for a theatre of observed life that his own plays had not supplied. The swerve is real and of form: one continuous act in near real time; characters made of many motives rather than a ruling trait; dialogue that drifts and doubles back as talk does; the set turned on a diagonal; the interval abolished and replaced by mime and dance. The stake was paid: Bonnier, Strindberg’s publisher, refused it, Seligmann cut and softened it, and the Danish censor stopped the public premiere. Held below the top because naturalism was a programme already in the air, and some of its means were Zola’s and Antoine’s first.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The single act without an interval is the argument: there is no moment in which the audience, or Julie, can step out of the night and recover, and the morning comes on the stage as it comes to her. The kitchen is the servants’ room, into which the mistress comes down; the play never leaves it, and the world upstairs exists only as the bell and the speaking tube, which is how servants know it. The seduction happens offstage, during the peasants’ dance, so that the form puts the audience where the servants are, outside the door, hearing the song. Held a step from the top by Julie’s narrated history, where the form turns briefly into a container for exposition.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, not promise: well over a century of staging and reading that has not settled it. The open questions are real ones: who wins, and whether Jean, saved for the bell, is master or still servant; whether Julie goes out to die or only goes out; whether the play endorses the Preface’s misogyny or exposes it, since its Julie has more pity and more inner life than the theory allows; whether Kristin’s religion is the play’s judgement or its satire. Each age has staged its own answer, from Alf Sjöberg’s film of 1951 to Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie, Katie Mitchell’s Fräulein Julie and Yaël Farber’s Mies Julie. Held below the top because its questions are few and sharp, and the transpositions mostly carry one of them, the class line, to new places.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is European drama of the nineteenth century, and Swedish literature within it. The force is high: the play and its Preface together are the most complete statement in drama of naturalism, and the one-act chamber form it uses reorganises what tragedy could be, three people, one room and an offstage world pressing on it, with no act to break the pressure. Held below the top because the reach is shared with Ibsen, who moved the same field further, and because Strindberg’s own later swerve, the dream plays, redirected the next century more than this did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Antoine’s Théâtre Libre staged it in Paris; Strindberg built his Intimate Theatre (1907) on the chamber play it began; O’Neill named Strindberg his master in his Nobel lecture.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Just under a hundred and forty years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries, within its usual band. Presence is continuous and wide, and not mainly academic: among the most staged plays of the Scandinavian repertory, translated into the main languages of the world, filmed by Sjöberg (1951, sharing the Grand Prix at Cannes), Mike Figgis (1999) and Liv Ullmann (2014), made a ballet by Birgit Cullberg (1950) and operas by Ned Rorem and William Alwyn. It has outlived its conditions. Charged on form a little: the first edition’s cuts stood for decades, so the text most read was not the whole one, and the Preface’s Darwinism dates the frame. Not higher, because its fame is a theatre’s, narrower than the most read novels of its century.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the original as far as it can be judged here; the Swedish sentence is neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: the dance offstage at the start, so that Julie is reported before she enters; Kristin cooking a foul brew to rid Julie’s bitch Diana of the litter she got by the gatekeeper’s pug, an animal’s misalliance set on the stove before the human one; the beer Julie drinks and the wine Jean drinks, which turn their classes inside out in a sip; the boots, the bell, the speaking tube, the razor on the table. The dialogue is made to sound unmade, and scenes turn on a gesture, the cinder in his eye, the kiss on her shoe. Charged: the block of exposition about her mother, and a coarseness in the late abuse.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the peasants’ mocking song and dance, which is folk comedy, and Julie’s walk out with the razor at sunrise; or Kristin’s churchgoing piety and Jean’s sale of himself to a future hotel. One law governs them: in every pair the stronger takes from the weaker, and every position of strength can be reversed except the one the bell enforces. The bird, the dog Diana and the gatekeeper’s pug, the boots, the dreams of falling and climbing, Kristin’s sermon on the first who shall be last: all obey it. The range is real for a single act, from farce to slaughter and trance. Charged: the Preface’s theory of heredity enters as a second law beside the play’s law of power, and the two do not always agree.
Score: 8.8 / 10
A small form, weighed for what it holds and not for being small. Consciousness: Julie’s divided self, Jean’s double nature. The family: the mother’s feminism and revenge, the father’s authority, a broken engagement. Labour and class: the kitchen, the livery, the cook’s economy, the servant’s ambition, the estate and its people. The sacred: Kristin’s church and the Lutheran morning. The natural order: Midsummer, lilac and birch, the animals. History is present as the hour of a class, the decline of the old estates and the rise of the new man with money, though only in talk. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state is absent, history is spoken of rather than enacted, and every order the play holds passes through two people in one room, narrow by design.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.9, then The Inevitable, The Swerve, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.8. A play staged continuously and widely for nearly a hundred and forty years, its uncut text restored; a single act without an interval that gives no one a way out of the night; three people and one room in which every exchange tightens the next; a break with the act structure of the European stage that cost its author his publisher and its premiere; and one law of power that governs a folk song and a razor at sunrise.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, family, class, labour, the sacred and the natural order are held and integrated, but the state is absent, history is only talked of, and every order passes through two people in one kitchen. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.4, where the heights are dreadful and come late, with deliberate low ground between them. The Preface’s theory of heredity costs The Unconcealment and The Inner Law. The Swedish sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of August Strindberg’s Fröken Julie. Ett naturalistiskt sorgespel, written in the summer of 1888 at Skovlyst near Copenhagen and published in Stockholm by Joseph Seligmann in November 1888, with the author’s Preface (Förord). It is scored as a text for performance: the uncut text from Strindberg’s surviving manuscript, as printed in the Swedish national edition (Samlade Verk). The first edition’s cuts are charged only as a matter of transmission, under The Imperishable. The Preface is not part of the play; it is weighed as context, under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, and never credited to the dialogue or the scenes. Productions, films and adaptations are evidence of the play’s life, and none of them is the work. Every axis, The Made included, is judged on Strindberg’s Swedish, which is not in hand. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The play is known scene by scene, but not line by line, and no line of its dialogue is quoted: only its title, whose words are certain, with a plain English rendering beneath; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Michael Robinson’s version (Oxford World’s Classics, Miss Julie and Other Plays, 1998), the one best known to this reading, and Michael Meyer’s (1964) beside it, were used for sense. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged or credited to the play. The rhythm of the Swedish prose, which is not heard here as by a native speaker, is neither credited nor charged. Names follow the usual English forms. Facts that could not be verified, among them the date, place and cast of the first performance, the running time, the length of the Preface, the year of the first public staging in Sweden and the year of the Paris production, are not given.