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Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts.

A >> August Strindberg >> Master Olof: A Drama in Five Acts.



Produced by Nicole Apostola




INTRODUCTION

The original prose version of Master Olof, which is here
presented for the first time in English form, was written between
June 8 and August 8, 1872, while Strindberg, then only twenty-three
years old, was living with two friends on one of the numerous
little islands that lie between Stockholm and the open sea.

Up to that time he had produced half-a-dozen plays, one of which
had been performed at the Royal Theatre of Stockholm and had won
him the good-will and financial support of King Carl XV. Thus he
had been able to return to the University of Upsala, whence he
had been driven a year earlier by poverty as well as by spiritual
revolt. During his second term of study at the old university
Strindberg wrote some plays that he subsequently destroyed. In
the same period he not only conceived the idea later developed in
Master Olof, but he also acquired the historical data underlying
the play and actually began to put it into dialogue.

During that same winter of 1871-72 he read extensively, although
his reading probably had slight reference to the university
curriculum. The two works that seem to have taken the lion's
share of his attention were Goethe's youthful drama Goetz von
Berlichingen and Buckle's History of Civilization in England.
Both impressed him deeply, and both became in his mind logically
connected with an external event which, perhaps, had touched his
supersensitive soul more keenly than anything else: an event
concerning which he says in the third volume of The Bondwoman's
Son, that "he had just discovered that the men of the Paris
Commune merely put into action what Buckle preached."

Such were the main influences at work on his mind when, early in
1872, his royal protector died, and Strindberg found himself once
more dependent on his own resources. To continue at the
university was out of the question, and he seems to have taken
his final departure from it without the least feeling of regret.
Unwise as he may have been in other respects, he was wise enough
to realize that, whatever his goal, the road to it must be of his
own making. Returning to Stockholm, he groped around for a while
as he had done a year earlier, what he even tried to eke out a
living as the editor of a trade journal. Yet the seeds sown
within him during the previous winter were sprouting. An
irresistible impulse urged him to continue the work of Buckle.
History and philosophy were the ultimate ends tempting his mind,
but first of all he was impelled to express himself in terms of
concrete life, and the way had been shown him by Goethe. Moved by
Goethe's example, he felt himself obliged to break through the
stifling forms of classical drama. "No verse, no eloquence, no
unity of place," was the resolution he formulated straightway.
[Note: See again The Bondwoman's Son, vol. iii: In the Red Room.]

Having armed himself with a liberal supply of writing-paper, he
joined his two friends in the little island of Kymmendö. Of money
he had so little that, but for the generosity of one of his
friends, he would have had to leave the island in the autumn
without settling the small debt he owed for board and lodging.
Yet those months were happy indeed--above all because he felt
himself moved by 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, at the very moment when
Olof has been goaded into open revolt against the abuses of the
Church, and when he is saved from the consequences of that revolt
only by the unexpected arrival of King Gustaf and his own
appointment as City Secretary. From the slightly strained, but
not improbable, coincidence of that start to the striking climax
of the last act, the play follows, on the whole, pretty closely
the actual course of events recorded in history. To understand
this course, with its gradually intensified conflict between the
King and Olof, it is above all necessary to bear in mind that the
former regarded the Reformation principally as a means toward
that political reorganization and material upbuilding of the
country which formed his main task; while to Olof the religious
reconstruction assumed supreme importance. This fundamental
divergence of purpose is clearly indicated and effectively used
by Strindberg, and we have reason to believe that he has pictured
not only Gustaf Vasa and Master Olof, but also the other
historical characters, in close accordance with what history has
to tell us about them. Among the chief figures there is only one
--Gert the Printer--who is not known to history, and one--the
wife of Olof--who is so little known that the playwright has been
at liberty to create it almost wholly out of his own imagination.

At the juncture represented by the initial scenes of the play,
Olof was in reality thirty-one years old, but he is made to
appear still younger. The King should be, and is, about twenty-
seven, while Lars Andersson is about fifty-four, and Bishop Brask
about seventy. Gert must be thought a man of about sixty, while
Christine must be about twenty. The action of the play lasts from
1524 to 1540, but Strindberg has contracted the general
perspective, so to speak, giving us the impression that the
entire action takes place within a couple of years. I have tried
to work out a complete chronology, and think it fairly safe to
date the several parts of the play as follows:

The first act takes place on Whitsun Eve, 1524, which means that
the exact date must fall between May 10 and June 13 of that year,
and probably about June 1.

The first scene of the second act occurs in the early evening of
a Saturday in the summer--probably in June--of 1524. The second
scene is fixed at midnight of the same day, and the third scene
on the following morning, which, in view of the fact that Olof is
to preach, we may assume to be a Sunday.

The first scene of the third act seems to take place four days
later, but Olof was not married until February, 1525,--to
"Christine, a maiden of good family,"--and it was only during
the winter of 1526-27 that the Church reformers were given
free rein by the King, and Olof himself was despatched to the
University of Upsala for the purpose of challenging Peder Galle,
the noted Catholic theologian, to a joint discussion. This was
also the time when the first Swedish version of the New Testament
was completed by Olof and Lars Andersson--an event referred to in
the scene in question.

The exact date of the second scene of the third act is St. John's
Eve, or June 24, 1527, at which time occurred the important
Riksdag at Vesterås, where the King broke the final resistance of
the nobility and the Catholic clergy by threatening to abdicate.
The debate between Olof and Peder Galle took place at the
Riksdag, Galle having evaded it as long as he could.

The date of the fourth act is very uncertain, but it seems safe
to place it in the summer of 1539, when Stockholm was ravaged by
an epidemic of a virulent disease known as "the English sweat."

The first scene of the fifth act is laid on New Year's Eve, 1539,
when Olof and Lars Andersson were arrested and charged with high
treason for not having informed the proper authorities of a plot
against the King's life. This plot was an old story, having been
exposed and punished in 1536. Their defence was that they had
learned of it through secret confession, which they as ministers
had no right to reveal. The trial took only two days, and on
January 2, 1540, both were sentenced to death.

The second scene of the final act must be laid in the spring of
1540, as the ceremony of confirmation has generally taken place
about Easter ever since the Swedish church became Lutheran.

While, in the main, Strindberg made the events of his play accord
with what was accepted as historical fact when he wrote, there
are anachronisms and inaccuracies to be noted, although to none
of them can be attached much importance. When, in the first and
second acts, he represents the Anabaptist leaders, Rink and
Knipperdollink, as then in Stockholm and actually introduces one
of them on the stage, he has merely availed himself of a legend
which had been accepted as truth for centuries, and which has
been exploded only by recent historical research. We know now
that Rink and Knipperdollink could never have been in Sweden, but
we know also that a German lay preacher named Melchior Hofman
appeared at Stockholm about the time indicated in the play, and
that, in 1529, another such preacher, named Tilemann, made Olof
himself the object of his fierce invectives. These instances
serve, in fact, to prove how skilfully Strindberg handled his
historical material. He is never rigid as to fact, but as a rule
he is accurate in spirit. Another instance of this kind is found
in the references in the first act to the use of Swedish for
purposes of worship. It is recorded--and by himself, I think--
that Olof once asked his mother whether she really understood the
Latin prayers, since she was so very fond of them. She answered:
"No, I don't understand them, but when I hear them I pray
devoutly to God that they may please Him, which I don't doubt
they do."

On the other hand, what maybe regarded as rather an awkward slip
is found in the first scene of the fifth act, where Gert cries
exultantly to Olof: "You don't know that Thomas Münster has
established a new spiritual kingdom at Mühlhausen." The name of
the great Anabaptist "prophet" was Thomas Münzer, and the place
where he established his brief reign was Münster. Strindberg's
habit was to fill his head with the facts to be used, and then to
rely on his memory. Marvellous as his memory was, it sometimes
deceived him, and checking off names or dates seems to have been
utterly beyond him. Thus it is quite probable that the passage in
question represents an unconscious error. At the same time it is
barely possible that the mistake may have been purposely laid in
the mouth of a fanatic, from whom exactness of statement could
hardly be expected. Thus, in the first act, Gert remarks that
"Luther is dead." We understand, of course, that this expression
is metaphorical, signifying that Luther has done all that can be
expected of him, but it is nevertheless characteristically
ambiguous.

The second scene of the third act is apparently laid in Olof's
house at Stockholm, although the location of the building is not
definitely indicated. We find him waiting for a messenger who is
to announce the results of the Riksdag then in session. But the
Riksdag was held at Vesterås, and we know that Olof was one of
two delegates sent by the burghers and the peasants to the King,
whom they implored "on their knees and with tears" to withdraw
his abdication. The Courtier's reference to Olof's debate with
Galle renders it still more uncertain whether we are in Stockholm
or in Vesterås. The Courtier also informs Olof of his appointment
as pastor of Greatchurch, the facts being that Olof was not
ordained until 1539 and received his appointment a year after the
events described in the last act of the play. In the metrical
version, Strindberg makes his most radical departure from the
historical course of events by letting Luther's marriage precede
and influence that of Olof, although in reality Olof's anticipated
that of Luther by several months.

The complaints of the Man from Småland in the first scene of the
second act could scarcely have been warranted in 1524, when that
act takes place. The hold of the young King was far too
precarious at that early date to permit any regulations of the
kind referred to. The establishment of a maximum price on oxen
does not seem to have occurred until 1532, and a prohibition
against the shooting of deer by the peasants was actually issued
in 1538, both measures helping to provoke the widespread uprising
that broke out in Småland in 1541. It was named the "Dacke feud"
after its principal leader, the peasant-chieftain Nils Dacke, to
whom the Sexton refers in the second scene of the last act--also
a little prematurely.

Whether these be conscious or unconscious anachronisms, they
matter very little when the general accuracy of the play is
considered. From the moment the Danes had been driven out of the
country, one of the most serious problems confronting the King
was the financial chaos into which the country had fallen, and
his efforts, first of all to raise enough means for ordinary
administrative purposes, and secondly to reorganize trade and
agriculture, brought him almost immediately into conflict with
the peasants, who, during the long struggle for national
independence, 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; 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.

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