Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts | Page 2

last, in the surprisingly brief time of two months, the whole play was ready--mighty in bulk and spirit, as became the true firstling of a young Titan.
Strindberg had first meant to name his play "What Is Truth?" For a while he did call it "The Renegade," but in the end he thought both titles smacked too much of tendency and decided instead, with reasoned conventionalism, to use the title of Master Olof after its central figure, the Luther of Sweden.
From a dramatic point of view it would have been hard to pick a more promising period than the one he had chosen as a setting for his play. The early reign of Gustaf Vasa, the founder of modern Sweden, was marked by three parallel conflicts of equal intensity and interest: between Swedish and Danish nationalism; between Catholicism and Protestantism; and, finally, between feudalism and a monarchism based more or less on the consent of the governed. Its background was the long struggle for independent national existence in which the country had become involved by its voluntary federation with Denmark and Norway about the end of the fourteenth century. That Struggle--made necessary by the insistence of one sovereign after another on regarding Sweden as a Danish province rather than as an autonomous part of a united Scandinavia--had reached a sort of climax, a final moment of utter blackness just before the dawn, when, at Stockholm in 1520, the Danish king, known ever afterward as Christian the Tyrant, commanded the arbitrary execution of about eighty of Sweden's most representative men.
Until within a few months of that event, named by the horror- stricken people "the blood-bath of Stockholm," the young Gustaf Eriksson Vasa had been a prisoner in Denmark, sent there as a hostage of Swedish loyalty. Having obtained his freedom by flight, he made his way to the inland province of Dalecarlia, where most of the previous movements on behalf of national liberty had originated, and having cleared the country of foreign invaders, chiefly by the help of an aroused peasantry that had never known the yoke of serfdom, he was elected king at a Riksdag held in the little city of Str?ngn?s, not far from Stockholm, in 1523.
Str?ngn?s was a cathedral city and had for several years previous been notorious for the Lutheran leanings of its clergy. After the death of its bishop as one of the victims of King; Christian, its temporary head had been the archdeacon, the ambitious and learned Lars Andersson--or Laurentius Andreae, as, in accordance with the Latinizing tendency of the time, he was more frequently named. One of its canons was Olof Pedersson--also known as Olaus Petri, and more commonly as Master Olof (Master being the vernacular for Magister, which was the equivalent of our modern Doctor)--who, during two years spent in studies at the University of Wittenberg, had been in personal contact with Luther, and who had become fired with an aspiration to carry the Reformation into his native country. By recent historians Master Olof has been described as of a "naively humble nature," rather melancholy in temperament, but endowed with a gift for irony, and capable of fiery outbursts when deeply stirred. At Str?ngn?s he had been preaching the new faith more openly and more effectively than any one else, and he had found a pupil as well as a protector in the temporary head of the diocese.
Immediately after his election, the new King called Lars Andersson from Str?ngn?s to become his first chancellor. Later on, he pressed Olof, too, into his service, making him Secretary to the City Corporation of Stockholm--which meant that Olof practically became the chief civil administrator of the capital, having to act as both clerk and magistrate, while at the same time he was continuing his reformatory propaganda as one of the preachers in the city's principal edifice, officially named after St. Nicolaus, but commonly spoken of as Greatchurch. As if this were not sufficient for one man, he plunged also into a feverish literary activity, doing most of the work on the Swedish translations of the New and Old Testaments, and paving the way for the new faith by a series of vigorous polemical writings, the style of which proclaims him the founder of modern Swedish prose. Centuries passed before the effective simplicity and homely picturesqueness of his style were surpassed. He became, furthermore, Sweden's first dramatist. The Comedy of Tobit, from which Strindberg uses a few passages in slightly modernized form at the beginning of his play, is now generally recognized as an authentic product of Olof's pen, although it was not written until a much later period.
Strindberg's drama starts at Str?ngn?s, at the very moment when Olof has been goaded into open revolt against the abuses of the Church, and when he is saved from the