the whole play was ready--mighty in bulk and spirit, as became
the true firstling of a young Titan.

Strindberg had first meant to name his play "What Is Truth?" For
a while he did call it "The Renegade," but in the end he thought
both titles smacked too much of tendency and decided instead,
with reasoned conventionalism, to use the title of Master Olof
after its central figure, the Luther of Sweden.

From a dramatic point of view it would have been hard to pick a
more promising period than the one he had chosen as a setting for
his play. The early reign of Gustaf Vasa, the founder of modern
Sweden, was marked by three parallel conflicts of equal intensity
and interest: between Swedish and Danish nationalism; between
Catholicism and Protestantism; and, finally, between feudalism
and a monarchism based more or less on the consent of the
governed. Its background was the long struggle for independent
national existence in which the country had become involved by
its voluntary federation with Denmark and Norway about the end of
the fourteenth century. That Struggle--made necessary by the
insistence of one sovereign after another on regarding Sweden as
a Danish province rather than as an autonomous part of a united
Scandinavia--had reached a sort of climax, a final moment of
utter blackness just before the dawn, when, at Stockholm in 1520,
the Danish king, known ever afterward as Christian the Tyrant,
commanded the arbitrary execution of about eighty of Sweden's
most representative men.

Until within a few months of that event, named by the horror-
stricken people "the blood-bath of Stockholm," the young Gustaf