Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts | Page 5

had become accustomed to do pretty much as they
pleased. The utterances of the Man from Småland are typical of the
sentiments that prevailed among the peasants throughout the country,
not least when he 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;