Several of the minor themes running through the play may to the reader seem not only minor but hopelessly trivial. I am thinking principally of the constantly recurring charge against servants that they take the nourishment out of food before serving it to their masters. This suspicion seems to have been one of Strindberg's fixed ideas, occurring in almost every work where the relationship between masters and servants is at all mentioned. I think he has harped too much on this theme, both in "The Spook Sonata" and elsewhere. I think, too, that he is wrong in placing the responsibility with the servants. On the other hand, I think one of his services is that he works with modern science to bring us a better realisation of the dose interrelation between the material basis of our existences and the more important spiritual overtones.
"The Spook Sonata" was written and published in 1907. It was played for the first time on January 27, 1908, at the Intimate Theatre, Stockholm, reaching a total of twelve performances.
The little scene named "The First Warning" is frankly autobiographical. It relates an actual incident from Strindberg's first marriage, to which, I think, he makes reference in "A Fool's Confession"—a work, by the bye, which should really be named "A Fool's Plea" in English.
In spite of sinister undertones, "The First Warning" is distinctly a comedy, and practically the only short thing in a lighter vein written by Strindberg. At first he named it "The First Tooth," but he had adopted the present title before the original publication—with three other one-act plays—occurred, in 1893. In Germany the play is known under the name "Signs of Autumn" (Herbstzeichen). Beginning on September 10, 1910, it was given eight times in all at the Intimate Theatre, Stockholm, but long before that time it had been played a number of times on various German stages.
King Gustavus I, founder of the Vasa dynasty, which reigned over Sweden until 1818, has rightly been called the "father" of his country and the builder of modern Sweden. He finished the war of liberation, by which the hampering and unsatisfactory union between Sweden and the other two Scandinavian kingdoms was finally severed. But he did much more. He reorganised the whole country, in all its departments, on such a basis of efficiency that it became able to play the part of a great European power for more than a century. Some have pictured him as a sort of superman. Others have called him a mere country squire, applying the methods of stable and barn to a whole country. Both those views of him are probably correct as well as incorrect. He was undoubtedly first of all an able and conscientious peasant on a large scale, but as such he was very much in place at a time when agriculture was the only source of income that could be called national. And his cares on behalf of commerce and mining show him to have had a very broad and foresighted view of husbandry.
The figure of the first Vasa took an early hold of Strindberg's imagination. He introduced it in the first version of his first great play, "Master Olov." But there the king was a subordinate character—so much so, in fact, that he did not appear at all in the final metrical version of the play, completed in 1877. At that time Strindberg was more interested in Master Olov, the dreaming idealist who placed religious reform above political and economical reorganisation. When, in 1899, he returned to "old King Gustav," his interest had shifted, and in this play, said to be his greatest historical drama—and one of the greatest of its kind in the annals of modern literature—the royal figure dominates absolute.
When I first contemplated a translation of this play I feared it would be necessary to preface it with a condensed history of Sweden during the early sixteenth century. Having finished my task, I find that an elaborate historical introduction would merely be a duplication of the work done by the playwright. Barring a few minor points that have been illuminated by notes, all the history needed for the understanding of the play will be found within the play itself. The truth of the matter is that Strindberg was not writing history but poetry, and that he was more anxious to portray human character than to set forth all too familiar historical events.
He portrayed his main character in more than one way and sense, however. The King, as we find him in the drama, is a wonderfully vivid and faithful reconstruction of a great man that has writ himself in large letters on the map of his country. But he is also a symbolisation of a type that will always remain one of the most fascinating of all that people the earth: that of the ruler who is conscious both his mission and of the price that must be paid for its fulfilment. The problem of Strindberg's play might be said to be this: granted such a mission, how much has a man the right to pay for its proper fulfilment? And as behoves a poet Strindberg has brought this problem to no triumphant "Q.E.D." His ambiguous, yet tremendously significant, answer seems to be: "Such a man has the right to do whatever his mission demands, even though it may go against his grain as an individual, but he must be humble about it and not confuse himself with Providence." Gustavus is humbled and made to suffer, not because of this or that act, but because of an inclination to consider his own mission the only one in sight.