Maeterlinck’s Golaud:
Between Shakespearean ‘Sadism’ and Emersonian Disquiet
François de Médicis
Debussy: Text and Idea
Gresham College
Three Arguments
Golaud’s increasing violence may be explained by his
jealousy and frustration at his inability to understand the
spiritual communion between Pelléas and Mélisande.
Maeterlinck play suggests a marked parallel between Golaud
and Othello.
 Maeterlinck provides a critique of Shakespeare after the
writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).
Henri Ronse:
Pelléas is an 1890s Shakespearean dream.
A dream of Maeterlinck’s entangled with the
shadows of Shakespeare. Pelléas is Hamlet to
some degree; Melisande, Ophelia. Golaud is
Othello; Arkel, Lear at the end of his journey or,
even better, Prospero. Maeterlinck dreams of
Shakespeare and our inability to inhabit
Shakespeare’s major roles.
. (Ronse’s preface to: Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande. Brussels: Labor, 1992.)
Jean-Marie Carré:
The giant Golaud recalls Othello to some extent.
Through his fate (he causes his wife and her
presumed lover’s deaths), with his jealousy and
rage (he drags her around by the hair), and
through his repentance (at Mélisande’s deathbed
in Act V).
(Jean-Marie Carré, « Maeterlinck et les littératures étrangères. »
Revue de littérature comparée 3 , p. 466.)
The Progress of Golaud’s Jealousy
1) Golaud’s suspicions are raised when he discovers that
Mélisande has lost her ring . He sends the terrified young woman
out into the night to search her ring in the cave.
2) Golaud catches Pelléas and Mélisande around midnight: she
is held captive by her hair (which Pelléas has tied to a willow’s
branches). Bending over her window-sill, she tries to give him
her hand.
3) Golaud leads Pelléas into an underground passage, refers to
the events of the previous night, and says that Mélisande is
pregnant. The scene, filled with innuendo, may be an
intimidation tactic on Golaud’s part.
4) Beneath Mélisande’s bedroom window, Golaud asks
his son to spy on the 2 young lovers.
The Progress of Golaud’s Jealousy (cont.)
5) Golaud interrupts Mélisande and Arkël’s peaceful
conversation. Losing control, he engages in acts of
domestic violence, progressing from verbal to physical
abuse. He grabs his wife by her hair, pulling her around
in a brutal imitation of the sign of the cross.
6) Pelléas and Mélisande meet in the park, and after
the castle has closed its doors, they confess their love
to each other and embrace passionately. Golaud
surprises them, kills Pelléas, and then wounds
Mélisande before turning his weapon against himself.
7) Golaud, who despite his violent outburst has not
recovered his peace of mind, continues questioning
Mélisande on her relationship to Pelléas, even on her
deathbed.
Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act IV Scene 2
GOLAUD: Come, what makes you look at me like a beggar? I
have not come here for your charity. You are hoping to see
something written in my eyes, while I should see nothing
yours might have to tell me? Do you believe I’ve discovered
something? (To Arkël) Do you see those great eyes? And how
proud of the wealth of their beauty?
ARKËL: I see only great innocence.
GOLAUD: A great innocence only!... No innocence as great as
they are… They are more pure than the eyes of a lamb… Why,
God might take a lesson in innocence from them! A great
innocence only! Just see here! I am so close I can feel the
breath their lids make in closing; but nevertheless, I am
less far from the secrets of the other world, than I am from
knowing anything about these eyes!...
Violence and Swearing
 Golaud declares that God could take a lesson in
Innocence from Mélisande’s eyes.
He comes to take his sword from a prayer chair
(prie-dieu)
 He drags Mélisande around by the hair creating a
Pattern resembling the sign of the cross.
These sacrilegious acts betray his frustration with the
mystery of her sacred, invisible mystery.
Maurice Maeterlinck, ``The Tragical in Daily Life``
(excerpt Treasure of the Humble)
« What can I learn from creatures who have but one fixed idea,
and who have no time to live, for that there is a rival, or a
mistress, whom it behoves them to put to death ? […] I admire
Othello, but he does not appear to me to live the august daily
life of a Hamlet, who has the time to live, inasmuch as he does
not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an
ancient error to imagine that it is at the moments when this
passion, or others of equal violence, possesses us, that we
live our truest lives ? »
Maurice Maeterlinck, Le trésor des humbles
« I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his
armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside him ; […],
interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and
windows and the quivering voice of the light, […], — I have
grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in
reality a deeper, more human and more universal life than the
lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in
battle, or ‘the husband who avenges his honour.’ »
Maurice Maeterlinck. The Treasure of the Humble, p. 105-106.
Arkel et Golaud?
Maurice Maeterlinck, « Introduction à Novalis »
« Thus, to return to this ordinary consciousness which reigns
supreme at so great a distance from our soul, I know more than
the one person whom the marvellous picture of Othello’s
jealousy, for example, no longer astounds. It is determinate in
the first circles of man. It remains, provided one takes care to
open neither the doors nor the windows; otherwise the image
falls into dust in the breath of all the unknown that awaits it
outside.»
Maurice Maeterlinck, « Introduction » à sa traduction de Novalis On Emeson and
Other Essays, p. 63. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914). Translated by
Montrose J. Moses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
« Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of
meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had
another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal,
and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these
things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being
emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural
history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare
employed them as colors to compose his picture. […] And
never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius,
namely to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols
and imparts this power. […] As long as the question is of talent
and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.
But when the question is, to life and its materials and its
auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify?
Le rapport des personnages à l’absolu
Mélisande (et Pelléas): privileged vehicle to the absolute; opens
the way for Pelléas to supra-sensitive realities (Maeterlinckian
conception of feminity).
Golaud: vaguely senses the existence of superior truths.
Arkël: displays wisdom comparable to that of Emerson; enjoying
simple pleasures while resigned to the course of destiny.
Yniold: illustrates the Maeterlinckian conception of childhood,
holder of an intuitive wisdom, mysteriously acquired through
human evolution and naturally close to the absolute
Geneviève: withdrawn, as befits a mature Mélisande, resigned
to a dull and monotonous existence and to the impoverished
light.