of representative government had not been achieved until seven
years earlier. Strindberg was at first stunned by this failure.
He seriously contemplated giving up writing altogether. When he
had recovered somewhat, he seems reluctantly to have faced the
possibility that the fault might be found in the play and not in
the public.

So he set about to re-write it--and he did so not only once but
repeatedly, producing in all six versions that differ more or
less from one another. At first he clung to the prose form.
Gradually he began to introduce verse, until finally, in 1877 or
1878, he completed an almost new play, where the metrical form
predominated without being used exclusively. This version was
actually published in 1878. Originally, an epilogue was appended
to it, but this was dropped from all but a small part of the
first edition. It is supposed to take place a number of years
later than the fifth act, and shows Olof with his two sons
outside the city walls of Stockholm, where they witness a
miracle-play introducing God as the principle of darkness and
Lucifer as the overthrown but never conquered principle of light.
The bitter generalizations of this afterthought explain
Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later Strindberg--the
man who wrote Advent, for instance--it must have seemed one of
his most unforgivable offences.

Although Strindberg's main object in working over his play
undoubtedly was to obtain its production, the metrical version
was not put on the stage until 1890, when, however, it was
performed at the Royal Theatre, toward which its author had
looked so longingly and so vainly eighteen years earlier. The