Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)

dr. Ferenc Kerényi: A Dramatic Poem from Hungary to the Theaters of the World

gedy was followed by Goethe’s Faust and Lord Byron’s Manfred and in 1883, as the last link in this chain, by Lessing’s Wise Nathan. Paulay himself admitted that it was the Vienna Brugtheater’s performance of the Faust trilogy in January 1883 which convinced him that it was indeed possible to stage the Tragedy.

However, before Madách’s poem could be squeezed into a three and a half hour performance on the stage, the text had to be greatly adapted — Paulay kept only 2560 of the more than 4100 lines in the original and eventually divided them into a Prologue and five parts. The Prologue consisted of the three first scenes and was staged in the wings; tulle curtains, representing clouds were pulled up to signal the changing of the scene. Part I comprised the Egypt and Athens scenes, Part II the Rome and Constantinople scenes, Part III the London scene. Part V consisted of the Phalanstery scene, the Eskimo scene - complete with the most important lines from the deleted space scene - and the closing scene, set outside Paradise.

Some parts of the original Tragedy had to be deleted not due to length but due to staging difficulties, as for instance the procession of the created world in front of the Lord. The Lord was represented by a triangle — the symbol of the Divine Eye in the first scene and whose lines were spoken in the last scene by the archangels. It was due to this same reason that the display of Pharaoh’s power and the destruction of Rome and the Space scene were omitted. The eighth scene however was conceived by Paulay in an interesting and unique way. True to Madách’s liberal ideas, Paulay thought the deletion of Kepler’s drunken dream, the shortening of the scene and the combining of the two Prague scenes (Scenes VIII and X) justified, because, as he wrote: „I did not deem it necessary to show Adam-Kepler dreaming the great French Revolution in a wine-induced, drunken sleep. It would have been dangerous to make him appear as an old cuckold who, while seeking consolation in wine, is confronted by a dream of the loftiest ideas.” And so the Prague scene ended the act, and the very first night showed the correctness of Paulay’s calculation: the success of the Marseillaise surpassed everything else.

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