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