Plays by August Strindberg, Second series

Produced by Nicole Apostola
Introduction to There Are Crimes and Crimes THERE ARE CRIMES AND CRIMES
Introduction to Miss Julia Author's Preface MISS JULIA
Introduction to The Stronger THE STRONGER
Introduction to Creditors CREDITORS
Introduction to Pariah PARIAH
Strindberg was fifty years old when he wrote There Are Crimes and Crimes. In the same year, 1899, he produced three of his finest historical dramas: The Saga of the Folkungs, Gustavus Vasa, and Eric XIV. Just before, he had finished Advent, which he described as A Mystery, and which was published together with There Are Crimes and Crimes under the common title of In a Higher Court. Back of these dramas lay his strange confessional works, Inferno and Legends, and the first two parts of his autobiographical dream-play, Toward Damascus —all of which were finished between May, 1897, and some time in the latter part of 1898. And back of these again lay that period of mental crisis, when, at Paris, in 1895 and 1896, he strove to make gold by the transmutation of baser metals, while at the same time his spirit was travelling through all the seven hells in its search for the heaven promised by the great mystics of the past.
There Are Crimes and Crimes may, in fact, be regarded as his first definite step beyond that crisis, of which the preceding works were at once the record and closing chord. When, in 1909, he issued The Author, being a long withheld fourth part of his first autobiographical series, The Bondwoman's Son, he prefixed to it an analytical summary of the entire body of his work. Opposite the works from 1897-8 appears in this summary the following passage: The great crisis at the age of fifty; revolutions in the life of the soul, desert wanderings, Swedenborgian Heavens and Hells. But concerning There Are Crimes and Crimes and the three historical dramas from the same year he writes triumphantly: Light after darkness; new productivity, with recovered Faith, Hope and Love—and with full, rock-firm Certitude.