Part 1 (1/2)
Master Olof.
by August Strindberg.
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 cla.s.sical 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 Kymmendo. 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 t.i.tan.
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 t.i.tles smacked too much of tendency and decided instead, with reasoned conventionalism, to use the t.i.tle 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 Strangnas, not far from Stockholm, in 1523.
Strangnas 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 Strangnas 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 Strangnas 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 princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sed before the effective simplicity and homely picturesqueness of his style were surpa.s.sed. He became, furthermore, Sweden's first dramatist. The Comedy of Tobit, from which Strindberg uses a few pa.s.sages 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 Strangnas, 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 princ.i.p.ally as a means toward that political reorganization and material upbuilding of the country which formed his main task; while to Olof the religious reconstruction a.s.sumed 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sume 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 Vesters, where the King broke the final resistance of the n.o.bility 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 wors.h.i.+p. 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 G.o.d 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 Munster has established a new spiritual kingdom at Muhlhausen.” The name of the great Anabaptist ”prophet” was Thomas Munzer, and the place where he established his brief reign was Munster. 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 pa.s.sage 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.