Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts | Page 5

speaks of the King's intention to "take away their priests and friars," for the majority of the Swedish people were at that time still intensely Catholic, and remained so to a large extent long after the Reformation officially had placed Sweden among Protestant countries.
Much more serious than any liberties taken with dates or facts, I deem certain linguistic anachronisms, of which Strindberg not rarely becomes guilty. Thus, for instance, he makes the King ask Bishop Brask: "What kind of phenomenon is this?" The phrase is palpably out of place, and yet it has been used so deliberately that nothing was left for me to do but to translate it literally. The truth is that Strindberg was not striving to reproduce the actual language of the Period--a language of which we get a glimpse in the quotations from The Comedy of Tobit. Here and there he used archaic expressions (which I have sometimes reproduced and sometimes disregarded, as the exigencies of the new medium happened to require). At other times he did not hesitate to employ modern colloquialisms (most of which have been "toned down"). He did not regard local color or historical atmosphere as a supreme desideratum. He wanted to express certain ideas, and he wanted to bring home the essential humanity of historical figures which, through the operations of legendary history, had assumed a strange, unhuman aspect. The methods he employed for these purposes have since been made familiar to the English-speaking public by the historical plays of Bernard Shaw and the short stories and novels of Anatole France.
In his eagerness, however, to express what was burning for utterance in his own breast, the second purpose was sometimes lost sight of; and at such times Strindberg hesitated as little to pass the bounds imposed by an historical period as to break through the much more important limitations of class and personal antecedents. Thus, for example, the remarks of Olof's mother are at one moment characterized by the simplicity to be expected from the aged widow of a small city tradesman in the early part of the sixteenth century, while in the next--under the pressure of the author's passion for personal expression--they grow improbably sophisticated. Yet each figure, when seen in proper perspective, appears correctly drawn and strikingly consistent with the part assigned to it in the play. In his very indifference to minor accuracies, Strindberg sometimes approaches more closely to the larger truth than men more scrupulous in regard to details. How true he can be in his delineation of a given type is perhaps best shown by the figure of Gert. The world's literature holds few portrayals of the anarchistic temperament that can vie with it in psychological exactness, and it is as true to-day as it was in 1524 or in 1872.
This verisimilitude on a universal rather than a specific plane assumes still greater significance if we consider it in the light of what Strindberg has told us about his purpose with the main characters of his first great play. As I have already said, those characters were meant to be both mouthpieces of the author and revived historical figures, but they were also meant--and primarily, I suspect--to be something else: embodiments of the contradictory phases of a single individual, namely the author himself.
"The author meant to hide his own self behind the historical characters," Strindberg tells us, apropos of this very play. [Note: In one of his biographical novels, The Bondwoman's Son, vol. iii: In the Red Room.] "As an idealist he was to be represented by Olof; as a realist by Gustaf; and as a communist by Gert." Farther on in the same work, he continues his revelation as follows: "The King and his shadow, the shrewd Constable, represented himself [the author] as he wished to be; Gert, as he was in moments of aroused passion; and Olof, as, after years of self-scrutiny, he had come to know himself: ambitious and weak-willed; unscrupulous when something was at stake, and yielding at other times; possessed of great self-confidence, mixed with a deep melancholy; balanced and irrational; hard and gentle."
Finally, he gives us this illuminating exposition of his own views on the moral validity of the main characters, thus disposing once for all of the one-sided interpretations made by persons anxious to use this or that aspect of the play in support of their own political or social idiosyncrasies: "All the chief characters are, relatively speaking, in the right. The Constable, from the standpoint of his own day, is right in asking Olof to keep calm and go on preaching; Olof is right in admitting that he had gone too far; the scholar, Vilhelm, is right when, in the name of youth, he demands the evolution of a new truth; and Gert is right in calling Olof