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
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
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,