ising that broke out in Smaland in 1541. It was named
the "Dacke feud" after its principal leader, the peasant-chieftain
Nils Dacke, to whom the Sexton refers in the second scene of the last
act--also a little prematurely.

Whether these be conscious or unconscious anachronisms, they matter very
little when the general accuracy of the play is considered. From the
moment the Danes had been driven out of the country, one of the most
serious problems confronting the King was the financial chaos into which
the country had fallen, and his efforts, first of all to raise enough
means for ordinary administrative purposes, and secondly to reorganize
trade and agriculture, brought him almost immediately into conflict with
the peasants, who, during the long struggle for national independence,
had become accustomed to do pretty much as they pleased. The utterances
of the Man from Smaland are typical of the sentiments that prevailed
among the peasants throughout the country, not least when he speaks of
the King's intention to "take away their priests and friars," for
the majority of the Swedish people were at that time still intensely
Catholic, and remained so to a large extent long after the Reformation
officially had placed Sweden among Protestant countries.

Much more serious than any liberties taken with dates or facts, I deem
certain linguistic anachronisms, of which Strindberg not rarely becomes
guilty. Thus, for instance, he makes the King ask Bishop Brask: "What
kind of phenomenon is this?" The phrase is palpably out of place, and
yet it has been used so deliberately that nothing was left for me to
do but to translate it literally. The truth is that Strindberg was not
striving to reproduce the actual language of the Period--a language of
which we get a glimpse in the quotations from The Comedy of Tobit. Here
and there he used archaic expressions (which I have sometimes reproduced
and sometimes disregarded, as the exigencies of the new medium happened
to require). At other times he did not hesitate to employ modern
colloquialisms (most of which have been "toned down"). He did not regard
local color or historical atmosphere as a supreme desideratum. He wanted
to express certain ideas, and he wanted to bring home the essential
humanity of historical figures which, through the operations of
legendary history, had assumed a strange, unhuman aspect. The methods
he employed for these purposes have since been made familiar to the
E