However, when the curtain rises we find ourselves in Pisa at the end of the fifteenth century. The town is being besieged by Prinzivalle, the general of the army of Florence. The inhabitants are starving, and the city can hold out no longer. Guido Colonna, the commandant of the garrison, has sent his father, Marco, to Prinzivalle, and the envoy's return is awaited. He comes with this message: Florence has decided to annihilate Pisa. There is to be no question of a capitulation; the town is to be taken by assault, and the citizens butchered. Florence is pressing Prinzivalle to deliver the final assault; but he has intercepted letters by which it appears that he is unjustly accused of treachery. Death awaits him at Florence after his victory. He undertakes, therefore, to introduce a huge convoy of munition and provisions into the starving city, and to join the besieged army with the pick of his mercenaries. His condition is this: Monna Vanna, Guido's wife, shall come to his tent for the night, and she shall be naked under her cloak.
Guido is furious; but Monna Vanna decides to go. She has it in her power to save a whole city; and she thinks, as her father-in-law does, that two people have no right, by considering themselves, to ensure the destruction of so many thousands. There is no attempt on the dramatist's part to belittle the sacrifice she is willing to make; she has, at the time she makes up her mind, the time-honoured idea as to the importance of the sexual act. But she is an altruist, like the bees: it is not she, it is not her husband, it is the community that matters. Guido, however, is an egotist of the old school; he clings to his "honour" to such an extent that he thinks Pisa should be butchered to keep it intact. Monna Vanna goes....
ACT II.—Prinzivalle's tent. Sumptuous disorder. Hangings of silk and gold. Weapons, heaps of precious furs, huge coffers half open, overflowing with jewels and gorgeous raiment. Interview with Trivulzio, Commissary of the Republic of Florence; a copy of Cassius in Julius Cæsar—the emaciated man of thought, "the clear, fine intellect, the cold, acute, instructed mind"—"believes in Florence as the saint tied to the wheel believes in God." Prinzivalle on the other hand is an utter alien, a Basque or a Breton; but his victories have made him popular in Florence, and he might make himself dictator; Trivulzio, therefore, has denounced him to "the grey-headed, toothless, doting fools at home." Prinzivalle unmasks Trivulzio, who attempts to stab him, but only succeeds in gashing his face. Trivulzio very noble in his way; all for Florence. Excitement of the audience: will Vanna come? She comes; is she naked under her cloak? She has been wounded on the shoulder by a stray shot; just a scratch, but enough to serve as an excuse for exciting the audience. Prinzivalle tells her to show him the wound, and she half opens her cloak. He asks her directly: "You are naked under your cloak?" She answers "Yes," makes a movement to throw her cloak off (great tension), but he "stops her with a gesture." Now follows the great love-scene, in every way one of the finest things in modern drama. It turns out that they had played together as boy and girl in Venice. He has loved her ever since. He loves her now; and for that reason there is no question of her removing her cloak. Love triumphs over luxury. She goes back to Pisa, taking him with her, to save him from the Commissaries of Florence.
ACT III.—Convoy arrived, Pisa rejoicing, Guido cursing. Vanna comes, deliriously acclaimed. She has the great news for Guido that she returns unscathed. He refuses to believe it. Everybody refuses to believe it except Marco. She introduces Prinzivalle; and Guido persuades himself that she has trapped the brute, and brought him for private butchery. Since Guido will not credit the truth, she gives him the lie he asks for: "Il m'a prise," she cries out. But she claims Prinzivalle as her own prey, and has him conducted to the dungeons on the understanding that she will end his life herself. The spectators, however, who have an advantage over Guido in that they hear various asides, understand that she will rescue the Florentine general and elope with him. Guido can believe she could lie, therefore he does not love her—he only loves his "honour"; therefore she cannot love him, Prinzivalle, on the other hand, had been most undisguisedly frank in his private interview with her. It is clear he loves her; and since she is no longer bound to love her husband, she is free to love Prinzivalle. "It was an evil dream," she says; "the beautiful is going to begin...."
To some critics the weak point in the drama might seem to be this: Monna Vanna goes out to Prinzivalle although she has no reliable information as to what manner of man he is. There was the greatest likelihood, Guido might have urged, that the man who makes such an infamous condition will not dream of keeping his promise. But the dramatist makes the heroine tell Prinzivalle that the one man who could have given her a favourable account of his character (and who, as we know, had given a favourable account of it to Guido) had told her nothing about him; possibly Maeterlinck desired in this way to emphasise the motive that Monna Vanna goes to sacrifice her honour on the mere chance of saving the city.
The scene between Prinzivalle and Trivulzio in the second act has points of similarity with the argument of Browning's Luria. This was pointed out by Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale in an article in the New York Independent of the 5th March, 1903. Browning's play, too, is set in the fifteenth century on the eve of a battle between Pisa and Florence; and, like Prinzivalle, "Luria holds Pisa's fortunes in his hand." Both Luria and Prinzivalle are "utter aliens "; and both are modelled on Othello (Luria is a Moor; Prinzivalle is "a Basque or a Breton," but he has served in Africa). The character of the two Commissaries in the plays is identical. Maeterlinck wrote as follows to Professor Phelps:
"You are quite right. There is a likeness between [Browning's play and] the scene in the second act, in which Prinzivalle unmasks Trivulzio. I am surprised nobody has noticed it before, the more so as I made no attempt to conceal it, for I took exactly the same hostile cities, the same period, and almost the same characters; although of course it would have been very easy to alter the whole. I admire Browning, who, in my opinion, is one of the greatest of English poets. For that reason I regarded him as belonging to classic and universal literature, and as a poet whom everybody ought to know; and I thought I was entitled to borrow a situation, or rather the fragment of a situation, from him, a thing which occurs every day with Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Such borrowings take place coram populo, and are in the nature of a public homage. I regard the scene as a passage which I have piously dedicated to the poet who created in me the atmosphere in which Monna Vanna was written."
With this naïve and sincere letter Maeterlinck clears himself of any charge of plagiarism. If he was a plagiarist in Monna Vanna, he was a plagiarist, too, in Joyzelle (1903), for in a postscript of his letter to Professor Phelps he confesses that this play was written in the atmosphere of Shakespeare's Tempest.
Joyzelle, another dramatised essay, is again written in the irritating blank verse which Maeterlinck at this stage of his career seems to have grown perversely fond of. To Merlin (Prosper rechristened) on his enchanted island comes his long-lost son Lancéor. The first person the newcomer meets is Joyzelle, who is destined to be his bride if she stands the trials prepared for her. The young couple fall in love with each other at first sight; but Merlin, who is attended by Arielle, his disembodied genius (his interior force, the forgotten power that sleeps in every soul), is also in love with Joyzelle.
Merlin, being a magician, is able to set traps for the lovers. He clouds the brain of Lancéor, and delivers him up to instinct, so that he compromises himself with Arielle, who for the purpose of playing the tempter has become visible, has half opened the veils that invest her, and unbound her long hair. (Men always fall into traps when their instinct leads them, their frailties being necessary for the designs of life.) Joyzelle discovers her lover in the act of embracing the supposed lady; but, with that nobility above jealousy which distinguishes the heroines of Maeterlinck after Astolaine, she continues to love him. She reveals to Lancéor, in curious language, the depth of her affections: