Symbolist Drama

Symbolist drama is a drama based on the philosophical teachings of the German idealist romanticists ( neo-romanticism ), an attraction to mysticism , to individualistic self-deepening, a transition to the field of illusory distractions.

The departure of playwrights from naturalism and impressionism to symbolism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was observed among writers who, at the beginning of their activity, adjoined the naturalistic concept of drama. So G. Hauptmann leaves the position of the social drama of the first period of his work and, starting with Hannele ( 1892 ), retreats into the world of illusory visions of The Drowned Bell ( 1896 ) and Pippa Dancing ( 1906 ). A profound change is gradually emerging in the work of G. Ibsen , passing in the late 1880s and early 1890s . from a critical analysis of society to the creation of symbolic images of the last period of creativity (The Wild Duck, 1884 ; The Builder Solnes, 1892 ; When We, the Dead, Sunday, 1899 ), and thereby paving the way for symbolist dramatists in Germany .

A departure from reality, self-deepening and a craving for mysticism lead to the disintegration of drama into a series of lyrically saturated paintings; preference is given to a one-act play, a brief, musical and lyrical scene, freed from the depiction of external events and plunged into a “human conscience free of conflicts” ( Meterlink ).

The action freezes and is sprayed, the volitional beginning is turned off. Verlaine’s slogan - “music first of all” - is widely used in drama turning into dramatic lyrics (for example, G. von Hoffmannsthal’s lyric dramas). The images become hazy, the characters become materialized, real signs and deeds are suggested to guess a different, mystical meaning, which is intended to be opened with the technique of the symbolist drama with its long pauses, musical echoes, obscured by the sounds of repeating remarks and rhythmic features of the sounding speech that help to catch intimate lyricism the senses.

The technique of symbolist drama is most clearly developed in Meterlink’s plays , for example, Blind People ( 1890 ), Inside There ( 1894 ), Beatrice’s Sister ( 1900 ), etc., where listening to “silence”, “music of the soul” and "Unconscious" framed in a harmonious system. Meterlink was also the main theorist of symbolist drama, who aptly characterized its features such as “progressive paralysis of external action”, “secondary dialogue”, revealing the mystical meaning hidden behind the spoken words, and the unreality of images that bring the symbolist drama closer to the puppet theater (see the works of Meterlink, Buried Temple, 1902 , Treasure of the Humble, 1897 , Double Garden, 1904, etc.).

Retrospective in the use of plots that are readily borrowed from distant, aesthetically perceptible eras (for example, the Renaissance and Venice of the 18th century from Hoffmannsthal ) or are drawn in the feudal Middle Ages (from Meterlink) from mystical legends and tales and are made out in the form of a fairy tale extravaganza (The Sunk Bell by G. Hauptmann ).

The themes and images of withering, dying off, sleeping and death, beloved in symbolist drama, reveal the pessimism inherent in a social group that has lost faith in the strength of life and is doomed to inaction.