



Produced by Nicole Apostola





MASTER OLOF

A DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS


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