In the five acts of this play Strindberg lets us see the human qualities of Gustavus Vasa; the dramatist draws a living soul, not a marionette; a man, hot-tempered, hard, strong, with a vein of irresoluteness running through the granite of his will, a man whose strength is blended with the weakness of the child within that never grows up. We see in him the inconsistency of all flesh: the mighty reformer of the Roman Catholic Church who upholds evangelical Lutheranism and yet clings to catholic habits; the brutal tyrant who has a way of his own of enforcing obedience by bringing his little steel hammer in ominous contact with obstinate heads, and who yet remains the kind, fatherly friend of his people. The patriarch who has identified himself with his country before the Lord, who has stood forth as a prophet of patriotism, and who is forced by growing self-knowledge to separate the personal from the impersonal, is at last humiliated by the goodness of others. Threatened by rebels who march towards Stockholm from the south, outwitted by his treacherous allies in Lübeck, the old king trembles at the news that the sturdy men of Dalecarlia are on their way to Stockholm. The retribution for his harsh deeds of suppression is upon him, and he bows his head before the chastisement of God. But the men of Dalecarlia are made of stuff which outlasts a few fallen heads. They have come in their thousands to help their king and their country to put the common enemy to flight. Engelbrecht, their leader—jolly, true and a little tipsy—bursts into the king's palace, and proudly offers him the arms and the devotion of the men in sheep-skin coats, true representatives of the Swedish spirit.
Eric, the king's dissolute and epileptic son, heir to the throne, is in every way a contrast to his father: he is the chronic weakling who oscillates between unholy desire and self-disgust, the born pariah in the realm of the mind, whether he be clad in purple or in rags. Of such, we think, the Kingdom of Heaven is not made. Yet Strindberg shows us Eric's glimpse of heaven. In the fourth act Eric and his boon companion and evil counsellor, Göran Persson, bent on the pleasures of the tavern, meet Karin, the flowergirl. She asks Eric to buy her wreath of flowers:
Prince Eric (looks fixedly at the girl). Who—is—that?
Göran Persson. A flowergirl.
Prince Eric. No—it—is—something else—do you see?
Göran Persson. What am I supposed to see?
Prince Eric. You ought to see what I see, but you can't.
The girl kneels before the prince. He takes the wreath from her hands, places it on her head, and asks her to rise. "Rise, my child," he says, "you must not kneel before me, but I shall kneel before you. I do not want to ask your name, for I know you, though I have never seen you, or heard anything about you." He begs her to ask a favour of him. She asks him to buy her flowers. Eric takes a ring off his finger, and gives it to the girl. She dare not wear it, and returns it. She leaves them, and Eric asks Göran if he has not seen the marvellous apparition, heard the wonderful voice. Göran has heard nothing but the voice of a common lass, a little cheeky.
Prince Eric. Hold your tongue, Göran, I love her.
Göran Persson. She is not the first one.
Prince Eric. Yes, the first one, the only one.
Göran Persson. Well, seduce her then.
Prince Eric (draws his sword). Take care, or by God——
Göran Persson. Is he going to prick me now again?
Prince Eric. I do not know what has happened, but from this moment I detest you; I cannot live in the same town as you; you pollute me with your eyes, your whole being stinks. Therefore I leave you, and never want to see you before my face again. I leave you as if an angel had come to fetch me from the dwellings of the wicked; I detest the past, as I detest you and myself. (Follows Karin.)
Though Strindberg shows an understanding of love's miracles—with which he is not generally credited—he makes no attempt to endow the first meeting between Eric and the peasant girl who became the mother of his children, and finally his queen, with a greater transfiguring power than it possessed. Here, as in all his historical dramas, he writes with the sense of the importance of the infinitely small, with the knowledge that "characters" and events arise out of the mind's contact with things that seem insignificant to the superficial observer. The wooden rigidity which the ordinary historian gives to the figures of the past, is the result of the incapacity to visualise the daily, the commonplace, in lives lived long ago. Strindberg's psychological conception of characters of the past is based on an almost microscopical power of seeing details. His own hypersensitive emotional memory initiated him into the manner, in which history is made by mood and temper, aches and pains—as well as by deliberate purpose of will and political programmes. Whether it be true or not that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was due to the toothache of Louis XIV, and that history was thus made by the ill-timed activity of molar nerves, psychological research into the origin of great events on the world's stage would reveal causes which the historian does not deign to consider.
Eric XIV, the drama of the reign of the mad son of the sane King Gustavus, is a masterpiece of life-like presentation. Searching comparisons between the arts of Strindberg and Shakespeare are otiose. But in the dramatic treatment of lunacy the author of Eric XIV may well be compared with the author of Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth. The dramatic verisimilitude of Strindberg's lunatics is made perfect through an experiential familiarity with the nethermost adventures of the mind, which Shakespeare lacked. In Eric XIV the monomania of persecution, the fitful délires de grandeur, the half-conscious cruelty are drawn with a spontaneous realism which is heightened by a terrible psychological accuracy of analysis. Strindberg has drawn almost as many mad and half-mad folk as Shakespeare. He can describe every form of mental derangement, and has not forgotten the soul obsessed by God and, therefore, detached from the world. In The Saga of the Folkungs the Voice of the Unseen speaks through an obsessed woman who sees the souls of people, and is able to reveal the hidden treachery of those who surround King Magnus. "One must be mad," says a barber in this play, "to have the courage to reveal all secrets at once." In Easter, the most mystical of Strindberg's plays, he draws an exquisite character of a young girl who is "mad," whose soul is pure and lovely, and who sees and hears things that happen far away. To her, also, all secrets are open; she can see the stars during the daytime, and, though her head is "soft," her spirit dwells in the realms of pure beauty. There is a fool in To Damascus; there is the frenzy of despair in The Father. The novels Remorse, At the Edge of the Sea and The Gothic Rooms present a gallery of psycho-pathological types.
Strindberg's novelistic treatment of lunacy has a natural profuseness of imagination, not unlike that of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky. It therefore bears little resemblance to the more artificial composition, typified by Paul Hervieu's L'Inconnu or Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla.
The scenes in Eric XIV are constructed with a finished workmanship, and an economy of events which make it one of Strindberg's most playable pieces. Consumed by jealous hatred of his brother, Johan, Eric keeps him a prisoner; a prey of malignant suspicion against everybody, Eric commits atrocious murders and endures frantic remorse. At last, Eric's excesses can no longer be endured by the people. He is imprisoned, and Johan becomes king. In Eric XIV the psychological dissection of character does not hinder the dramatic movement of the play; the playwright combines brilliant impressionism with due subservience to the laws of the theatre. In The Saga of the Folkungs he has allowed the psychological treatment to usurp the domain of drama. The play deals with a period in Swedish history when two brother kings occupied the throne. Here, too, we have sombre tragedy. There is no lack of dramatic elements, for the horrors of plague, hanging, flagellants and execution are shown upon the stage. But Strindberg has psychologised his characters so intensely that the flesh has, as it were, fallen away from their souls, and with that the obscurity of motives and objects which creates the deception upon which human action is built, and which is essential to drama. The effect of the play on the spectator is the intense, yet real, terror of a nightmare, from which we vainly struggle to awaken. The over-balance of psychological analysis mars some of the later historical dramas. It makes some of the transcendental plays and the chamber plays mere dramatic dialogues, pictures of minds in conflict; it gives us the Shadow Theatre of the Soul, and leads Strindberg to bold defiance of the rules of dramaturgy—including those laid down by himself.
The cycle of the Vasa plays—Master Olof, Gustavus Vasa and Eric XIV—bears the mark of the consummate craftsman. Their strength is the strength of reality, their beauty a perfect proportion of dramatic construction. A row of historical plays followed: Gustavus Adolphus (1900); Engelbrecht (1901); Charles XII (1901); Gustavus III (1903); Queen Christina (1903); The Nightingale of Wittenberg (1903); The Last Knight (1908); The National Director (1909); The Earl of Bjälbo (1909). Of these, Gustavus Adolphus with its breadth of battlefield panorama; Charles XII with its narrow searchlight on the declining figure of the lion-hearted, but beaten king; Queen Christina with its flamboyant sketch of the clever and capricious daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, are eminently playable. Gustavus III has pointed dialogue, cameo-like pictures of word-fencing; it faithfully paints the decadent time when Sweden was steeped in the sterile scepticism of France; it portrays the reaction which led to the assassination of the King of Masquerades, but the play is not woven with the dramaturgic skill of the former dramas. The Last Knight is an historical jugglery with ideas in five acts which strains the dramatic form beyond its measure of elasticity.