Master Olof deals with the Swedish Protestant Reformation. In the personality of Olaus Petri, the Swedish Luther, he had found all the elements needed for an historical drama of the soul's battle and final defeat by the world. Olof, the priest with a message, the fanatic who is willing to live and die for the cause of religious and social reform, surrenders to compromise. As Archbishop Olaus Petri he stands forth as the heretic who had purchased peace at the price of spirituality. The tragedy of enthusiasm, wrecked by the practical issues of life, is the theme of Master Olof, and it has seldom found a more intense dramatic expression.
Olaus, with the tongue of fire over his head, called to make war on the superstitions and avarice of the Roman Catholic Church, defies the bishops. He is saved from the consequences of their wrath by the King, who knows the value of the energy which impels the heresy. In Gustavus Vasa, the prudent King who makes Olof his secretary, Strindberg saw the opportunist, the man of worldly wisdom who neutralises great ideas by skimming their froth and rejecting their substance. Olof follows his light and becomes a conspirator against the King. But the King is stronger than he: caught, punished and pardoned, Olof at last becomes a dutiful servant of the State, and of the conservative powers which keep Society immune against the onslaughts of enthusiasts.
In Gerdt the printer, who urged the young Olof to become a Daniel and to speak the truth before kings, Strindberg saw the revolutionary who is the consistent enemy of compromise. In Olof's mother, who dies in the Catholic faith cursing her heretic son, he hears the eternal cry of the Old stabbed by the New; of the stagnant content that dwells in Woman when it is hurt by the passionate discontent that dwells in Man.
The relativity of truth and its perpetual evolution, the inevitable clashing of faiths and convictions, invest the struggle between mother and son with tragic reality. She has refused to call his wife anything but a harlot; for is she not living with a priest? She has in vain exerted parental authority to turn her son from the path of perdition. To her, Olof is the apostle of Antichrist, the child in the meshes of Satan, whom passionately she strives to save. "Ask me not," cries Olof to the mother before delivering his heretical sermon. "A mother's prayer can tempt angels in heaven to apostasy."
Two rascally priests pray by her deathbed, their thoughts intent on the bag of gold which tempts their cupidity. She dies comforted by their presence and shrinking from her son's defilement. But death smooths sharp differences, and when her eyes are closed Olof lights the holy candles, places a palm-branch in her hand, and prays for her forgiveness.
The figure of Strindberg's Olaus Petri, burning with religious fervour, proclaiming the true creed of Christ to the people who reply by throwing stones, a reformer who does not perish by his faith but lives by acceptance of common sense, is a contribution to the world's deathless dramatis personæ. He is very remote from Shakespeare's Wolsey, and the psychological climax is reversed, but there is an ecclesiastical magnificence in the two characters which forces comparisons.
There is an impressive simplicity in the language, and the author achieves the highest effects in portraiture with few rhetorical devices. The conflict of personalities makes the drama rich in contrasts, but they are softened by an atmosphere of fatalistic resignation before the irreconcilability of ideas. The characters are all right with the limited measure of rightness which is contained in each soul. They are all wrong with the wrongness which is inseparable from human form. In Master Olof Strindberg spoke as Goethe had spoken in Goetz von Berlichingen.
Master Olof was written during one of those periods of simple life and isolation which Strindberg sought with the craving of the repentant monk.
Debauch and drunkenness were eschewed, milk took the place of liquids of fermentation. Angling, swimming, fencing and mental gymnastics in the company of three sympathetic friends kept body and mind vigorous.
One of the friends paid his bill and our dramatist returned to town filled with hope and with the sense of relief of one who has at last said what he thinks. The play was sent to the manager of the Royal Theatre, and its author returned to the palette.