Miss Julie and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics)

Rating:
Summary: sexual passion and social position
Review: I don't care that much for Strindberg's other plays, but I love "Miss Julie." This is one of my favorite plays, a very gripping and powerful drama about a male servant and his employer's spoiled daughter who plays games with him. She's all too aware of her superiority over him in this wealthy household and she loves to rub it in his face. However, her upper-class boredom leads her to spend time with the servant chatting away and killing time, and she doesn't realize that by interacting with him in such a casual and personal way, she's bringing herself more and more down to his social level. She feels trapped in her idle life of money and privilege, and he feels trapped in his badly paid lowly job. But she envies his freedom. Each has the exact opposite of what the other has, and each wants what the other has. Also, there is one other ingredient--they are both attracted to each other in this conflict between sexual passion and social position. This play was coldly received when it first came out in 1888 for its startling modernity. The antagonistic love-hate relationship it shows between the man and woman is refreshingly modern even today.

David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"

Rating:
Summary: preferable for annotations, but a few minor problems
Review: I read The Father and the first part of Miss Julie in the University of California translation and then the rest of the plays in this one, and as far as I can tell neither seems more awkward than the other--but the Oxford translation holds the major advantage in that it contains copious notes on the many obscure literary and sociocultural references throughout the plays. I noticed that in at least some sections in the UC version the obscurities are ironed out (the English translation for "biblia pauperum" is incorporated into the text, and in The Father a reference to a book by an 18th century author unknown outside Sweden, unnecessary to the action, becomes "a book"), but there are many other cases where it is simply passed over without a mention. Granted, if you are buying a copy or multiple copies of the plays in order to perform them, it is unlikely that the references will be useful, but for those interested in a critical reading of them, the Oxford edition will undoubtedly be favorable. It is also mentioned that this edition draws off of the most recent versions of the original works being published as a set in Sweden, but since I have no knowledge of Swedish and there are no examples in either edition of the translation in progress, I can't really comment on that.

A minor point with the Oxford edition is that it seems very sloppily assembled at times, which is a bit surprising given the usual quality level in this series. For instance, the page-formatting was done inaccurately, so that whenever a parenthesis for a stage direction falls at the end of a line, it is cut off--and this occurs all throughout the book, not a crucial problem by any means, but just an unsettling indication of carelessness. There are also several spelling errors in the plays, and a couple misquotations in the annotations. Once again, these are not crucial flaws, but a little sloppiness can make the reader wonder what else was neglected which may have slipped past his awareness.

Overall, despite the flaws, this is the edition of Strindberg's major plays to have for a reader who is interested in not only performing but also studying the works.

(Edit, 2/11/04: I've just discovered that the parenthesis usage is standard practice for texts of plays in Britain, so my comments about that issue can be disregarded.)