Olof: A Drama in Five Acts

Excerpt-So he set about to re-write it--and he did so not only once but repeatedly, producing in all six versions that differ more or less from one another. At first he clung to the prose form. Gradually he began to introduce verse, until finally, in 1877 or 1878, he completed an almost new play, where the metrical form predominated without being used exclusively. This version was actually published in 1878. Originally, an epilogue was appended to it, but this was dropped from all but a small part of the first edition. It is supposed to take place a number of years later than the fifth act, and shows Olof with his two sons outside the city walls of Stockholm, where they witness a miracle-play introducing God as the principle of darkness and Lucifer as the overthrown but never conquered principle of light. The bitter generalizations of this afterthought explain Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later Strindberg--the man who wrote Advent, for instance--it must have seemed one of his most unforgivable offences.