The use of the name of Krummedikke in connection with the lake is a mystery I have not been able to clear up. The noble family of Krummedige or Krummedike belonged originally in the duchy of Holstein, but moved from there into Denmark and spread gradually into southern Sweden and Norway. During the period of Sweden's union with Denmark and Norway two members of that family held the famous old fortress of Baahus (now Bohus) on behalf of the Danish king. Other members controlled fortified places in Småland and the province of Halland along the west coast of present Sweden. But there is no record of any Krummedike having a "castle" in the northern part of Sweden. Whether legends connected with this family have actually spread from southern Sweden to Dalecarlia or the name, simply happened to catch Strindberg's fancy I cannot tell.
The play in its entirety is one of the most impersonal Strindberg ever wrote. Echoes of his private life are very rare—which is remarkable, considering how plentiful they are in such a work as the historical drama "Gustavus Vasa." In this respect "The Bridal Crown" connects logically with Strindberg's novels and stories from the islands outside of Stockholm: "The People at Hemsö," "Fisher Folks," and "At the Edge of the Sea." It seems that nothing helped more to take him out of himself and his morbid introspection than a study of the life of the common people.
How successful he was in that study is indicated by the wide popularity of the novels and stories in question as well as by the stage history of "The Bridal Crown." This play has been one of the most frequently produced of all his dramatic works. The first performance took place on September 14, 1907, at the Swedish Theatre, Stockholm, and since that time it has been played more than one hundred times in Stockholm alone—which is a great deal in Sweden.
The list of characters will suffice to indicate what a weird thing "The Spook Sonata" is. Rarely has Strindberg's peculiar fancy carried him further without bringing him to outright disaster. Mingling extreme realism of portrayal with a symbolism that frequently borders on the extravagant and the impossible, he has nevertheless produced a work that bites into the consciousness of the reader and challenges his thought to an unusual degree. The best characterisation of the play as a whole might be to call it a symbolistic mosaic pieced together with fragments of real life.
Reminiscences of the author's own life in all its periods recur constantly, and yet the play cannot be called autobiographical in any narrow sense. Not even its general tendency—if it can be said to have one—is particularly tied up with Strindberg's view of his own fate. No, the play is in all its aspects a generalisation along the lines of "The Dream Play," but brought nearer to the level and superficial appearance of every-day life.
One of its purposes is to illustrate the mysterious relationship between seemingly disconnected things and events which Strindberg during his latest period was so prone to discover everywhere.—When in this super-Swedenborgian mood, he was inclined to regard the slightest incident of daily life as a mere symbol meant to shadow or foreshadow vaster incidents on higher levels. It would be dangerous to accept his readings of life in this mood as so many formulations of truth, but, on the other hand, it would be unwise to discard them as meaningless. What must be remembered first and last in the study of Strindberg's work is that he was primarily, if not wholly, a bearer of suggestions rather than of final truths. We cannot go to him for knowledge of what life actually is, but we may be sure of never reading one of his pages without finding some new angle of approach, the use of which will help our own thought to enlarge our knowledge of actual life. Those who demand predigested thought will always be lost in the mazes of his irresponsible fancy. Those who ask nothing more of literature than to be set thinking will always find him one of the most fruitful writers produced by modern times.
For this very reason it would be futile to attempt any explanatory analysis of "The Spook Sonata." There must, in fact, be a separate analysis of that kind for every thinking reader. One may say, of course, that its name as well as the strange function which forms its central scene, points to an interpretation of all human life as a ghostly reflection of wasted and buried possibilities. But there is charity as well as bitterness in the play, and it seems to preach the lesson that we owe tolerance to every man but him who thinks himself better than the rest. It warns, too, against that interference with other lives which seems to have been one of the haunting spectres of Strindberg's own existence. In other words, the play may be regarded as a final passionate expression of his will to live his own life in his own way and of his resentment against real or fancied efforts to balk I that will.
Dramatically this play is well worthy of study, It contains some points that, whether successful or no in this particular connection, should not be passed over by future playwrights. Such a point, for instance, is the continued presence on the stage of several dumb characters during almost the entire first scene. I do not know whether it will come home to readers of the play that, while the conversation is going on between the Student and Old Hummel, for example, the Janitress and the Dark Lady are all the time present in the background as living reminders of the secret threads of human life underlying the conflict between the two men that do the talking. And the idea of trying to render simultaneous portrayal of life within and without a human habitation has again been tried by Strindberg in this play with very remarkable and suggestive results.
There are several signs which indicate that Strindberg changed his plan of the play while he was writing it. There is one character present on the list of characters in the Swedish text that never appears—the Janitor. On the other hand, that list does not contain the name of the Cook, who plays such a strange part in the final scene—a sort of infernalised Greek chorus with a Japanese soy bottle for its Dionysian emblem. The arrangement of the stage directions in the Swedish original indicates, too, that he intended a single setting to serve for the whole play. He hoped probably to be able to let the action laid within the house be seen from the outside, but, warned by his strong sense of theatrical feasibility, he changed his plans unhesitatingly, and with them his scenery.