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."