Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts | Page 2

an inspiration more
authentic than he had ever before experienced. Thus page was added to
page, and act to act, until at 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 Strängnäs, not far from Stockholm, in
1523.
Strängnäs 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 Strängnäs 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 Strängnäs 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 Strängnäs,