Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts | Page 7

this
afterthought explain Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later
Strindberg--the man who wrote Advent, for instance--it must have
seemed one of his most unforgivable offences.
Although Strindberg's main object in working over his play
undoubtedly was to obtain its production, the metrical version was not
put on the stage until 1890, when, however, it was performed at the
Royal Theatre, toward which its author had looked so longingly and so
vainly eighteen years earlier. The prose version, on the other hand, was
produced as early as 1881, at the New Theatre in Stockholm, but was
not published until the same year, when it appeared in book form
grouped with a number of other writings from Strindberg's earliest
period.
Of the five unprinted versions connecting the original prose drama of
1872 with the final metrical form of 1878, more or less complete
manuscripts have been preserved, and these are now being examined in
detail by the Swedish literary historian, Professor Karl Warburg. A
summary analysis by Dr. John Landquist is appended to the second
volume of the definitive edition of Strindberg's complete works (Albert
Bonnier, Stockholm), where the epilogue to the metrical version is also
reprinted after so many years of oblivion.
"Of all the manuscripts preceding the final metrical version," says Dr.
Landquist, "the original one, written when Strindberg was twenty-three,
is the masterpiece. There everything is consistent; there the dialogue
has a power and an incisiveness to which it does not attain in any of the
unprinted manuscripts. On the contrary, these seem more youthful than
the original, producing at times an impression of immaturity and

uncertainty on the part of the author. Even when some isolated phrase
strikes one as fortunate, it does not tend to strengthen the drama as a
whole. The later versions lack that sense of inner unity and that
audacious touch which lend fascination and power to the original
manuscript.
"Not until we reach the first metrical version (of 1876) does the full
power of the playwright begin to reassert itself in such fashion that out
of his untiring labors at last springs a new work, the mood of which
differs essentially from that of the first prose version. These two
versions--the first and the final --are the results of diametrically
opposed methods of work. The first was written with a certainty and
swiftness of inspiration that raised the young poet far above the
productive powers generally characteristic of his years. The subsequent
modifications prove merely how futile are the efforts of reason to
improve what intuition has inspired. But gradually it seems to have
dawned on the poet that he was about to evolve a wholly new
work--that what he had come to aim at was quite distinct from what he
had been aiming at in the beginning, and from that moment his artistic
reasoning carried him onward until at last a new inspiration brought the
work to its completion."
Concerning the final metrical version, I can give only a few outstanding
and rather superficial facts, hoping that I may some time have the
opportunity of presenting it entire to the American public. Like the
prose version, it has five acts, but these are not subdivided into scenes.
It is briefer, more concentrated both in spirit and in form, and may he
said to display a greater unity of purpose. It is more human, too, and
less titanic. The change shows itself strikingly in a figure like that of
Mårten, who in the metrical version has become softened into an
unconscionable but rather lovable rapscallion. The last remark but one
made by Mårten when driven from Dame Christine's deathbed by Olof
is: "Talk to your mother, son--the two of you have so much to forgive
each other."
In strength and passion and daring, on the other hand, the final version
falls far short of the original one, and the very fact that it is more

logical, more carefully reasoned, tends at times to render it less
psychologically true. Each version has its own merits and its own faults,
and in their appeal they are so radically different that a choice between
them must always remain meaningless except on temperamental
grounds. At one point, however--and an important one at that--the
metrical version seems to me the happier by far.
That cry of "renegade," which, echoing from the dim recesses of the
church, makes the prose version end on a note of perplexing irony, may
be theatrically effective, but it can hardly be called logical. Gert has
been disposed of. His sudden return out of the clutches of the soldiers is
inexplicable and unwarranted. Worse still, he has only a short while
previous been urging Olof to live on for his work. If Olof be a renegade,
he is so upon the advice of Gert