Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian playwright and essayist who developed an international reputation in the late nineteenth century, culminating in being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. His plays were a key part of Symbolist theatre, an experimental theatre movement that spread across Europe, drawing in some of the great playwrights of the age. Strindberg declared, on reading Maeterlinck, ‘he struck me like a new country and a new age’. His influence can be felt on writers from Chekhov to Samuel Beckett and beyond.
