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 Smaland 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