The Sacrament and Other Plays of Forbidden Love

Hugo Claus

січ. 2007 р. · Susquehanna University Press

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Hugo Claus, generally recognized as the greatest living writer in the Dutch language, became famous in the theater for several early works of particular force and daring. This volume includes three of those remarkable early plays: Bride in the Morning, Sugar, and The Sacrament. All three plays boast unforgettable characters trapped in a world of oppressive social mores. The central figures are all subject to sexual and creative impulses towards objects of forbidden love that bring disapproval and censure crashing in on them, subsequently bringing about their own ruin.

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Author and artist Hugo Claus was born in Bruges, Belgium in 1929. While in Paris, in his early twenties, he explored surrealism, existentialism, and modernism as a member of the Cobra group of experimentalist artists. Later in Rome he concerned himself with filmmaking and actually produced a film called Friday for which he wrote the script himself. He can be regarded as the primary developer of a technique which has become known as intertextuality. Its application in The Sign of the Hamster led to accusations of plagiarism, an accusation which many critics rejected because of the recognizability of the references which vary from the classics to the Middle Ages and his own time. He gained recognition as painter, poet, playwright, filmmaker, and writer of classical, psychological, modernist, and experimentalist novels. His best known work is The Sorrow of Belgium. The book consists of two parts, the first strongly autobiographic, situated in a Roman Catholic boarding school in Belgium, from which Louis, the protagonist, is expelled. The second part describes the experiences of a large number of people, including Louis's mother and father, during and shortly after World War II. He was charged with blasphemy for the play Masscheroen because of his irreverent representation of the Holy Trinity on the stage. This charge and the possibility of plagiarism identify Claus as a controversial writer. He died by euthanasia in Antwerp, Belgium on March 19, 2008.