Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts | Page 6

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 a renegade. The individual must always
become a renegade--forced by the necessity of natural laws; by fatigue;
by inability to develop indefinitely, as the brain ceases to grow about
the age of forty-five; and by the claims of actual life, which demand
that even a reformer must live as man, mate, head of a family, and
citizen. But those who crave that the individual continue his progress
indefinitely are the shortsighted --particularly those who think that the
cause must perish because the individual deserts it. ... It is an open
question, for that matter, whether Olof did not have a better chance to
advance his cause from the pulpit of the reformed Greatchurch than he
would have had in low-class taverns."
These passages were written by Strindberg fourteen years after the
completion of the play to which they refer. We have other evidence,
however, that, while he might have seen things more clearly in
retrospect, he had not been lured by the lapse of time into placing his
characters in a light different from that in which they were conceived.
On the list of characters forming part of the original handwritten
manuscript of the first version of Master Olof, now preserved in the
Public Library of Gothenburg, Sweden, the author has jotted down
certain very significant notes opposite the more important names. Thus
he has written opposite the name of the King: "To accomplish
something in this world, one has to risk morality and conscience;"
opposite the name of Olof: "He who strives to realize an idea develops
greatness of personality--he accomplishes good by his personal
example, but he is doomed to perish;" opposite that of Bishop Brask:
"There is movement in whatever exists--whatever stands still must be
crushed;" and opposite that of Gert: "He who wills more than his

reason can grasp must go mad."
Such was the play with which the young Strindberg returned to the
Swedish capital in the fall of 1872; and let us remember in this
connection, that up to the time in question no dramatic work of similar
importance had ever been produced in Sweden. Its completion was
more epoch-making for Sweden than that of Brand was for Norway in
1865--since the coming of Ibsen's first really great play was heralded
by earlier works leading up to it, while Master Olof appeared where
nobody had any reason to expect it. This very fact militated against its
success, of course; it was too unexpected, and also too startlingly
original, both in spirit and in form.
At the time there was only one stage in Sweden where such a work
could be produced--the Royal Theatre at Stockholm. To the officials of
this state--supported institution Strindberg submitted his
work--hopefully, as we know from his own statement. It was scornfully
and ignominiously rejected, the main criticism being that a serious
historical drama in prose was unthinkable. I shall make no comment
whatever on that judgment, having in mind how several years later
Edmund Gosse bewailed the failure of Ibsen to give a metrical form to
his Emperor and Galilean.
Strindberg's next effort concerned publication. In this respect he was
equally unsuccessful, although as a rule it has never been very difficult
in Sweden to find a publisher for any work of reasonable merit. But the
play was not only too original, it was too dangerously radical for a
country where a truly modern form of representative government had
not been achieved until seven years earlier. Strindberg was at first
stunned by this failure. He seriously contemplated giving up writing
altogether. When he had recovered somewhat, he seems reluctantly to
have faced the possibility that the fault might be found in the play and
not in the public.
So he set about to re-write it--and he did so not only once but
repeatedly, producing in all six versions that differ more or less from
one another. At first he clung to the prose form. Gradually he began to
introduce verse, until finally, in 1877 or 1878, he completed an almost

new play, where the metrical form predominated without being used
exclusively. This version was actually published in 1878. Originally, an
epilogue was appended to it, but this was dropped from all but a small
part of the first edition. It is supposed to take place a number of years
later than the fifth act, and shows Olof with his two sons outside the
city walls of Stockholm, where they witness a miracle-play introducing
God as the principle of darkness and Lucifer as the overthrown but
never conquered principle of light. The bitter generalizations of