himself once more
dependent on his own resources. To continue at the university was out
of the question, and he seems to have taken his final departure from it
without the least feeling of regret. Unwise as he may have been in other
respects, he was wise enough to realize that, whatever his goal, the
road to it must be of his own making. Returning to Stockholm, he groped
around for a while as he had done a year earlier, what he even tried to
eke out a living as the editor of a trade journal. Yet the seeds sown
within him during the previous winter were sprouting. An irresistible
impulse urged him to continue the work of Buckle. History and philosophy
were the ultimate ends tempting his mind, but first of all he was
impelled to express himself in terms of concrete life, and the way had
been shown him by Goethe. Moved by Goethe's example, he felt himself
obliged to break through the stifling forms of classical drama.
"No verse, no eloquence, no unity of place," was the resolution he
formulated straightway. [Note: See again The Bondwoman's Son, vol. iii:
In the Red Room.]

Having armed himself with a liberal supply of writing-paper, he joined
his two friends in the little island of Kymmendoe. Of money he had so
little that, but for the generosity of one of his friends, he would have
had to leave the island in the autumn without settling the small debt
he owed for board and lodging. Yet those months were happy indeed--above
all because he felt himself moved by an inspiration more authentic than
he had ever before experienced. Thus page was added to page, and act to
act, until at last, in the surprisingly brief time of two months, the
whole play was ready--mighty in bulk and spirit, as became the true
firstling of a young Titan.

Strindberg had first meant to name his play "What Is Truth?" For a while
he did call it "The Renegade," but in the end he thought both titles
smacked too much of tendency and decided instead, with reasoned
conventionalism, to use the title of Master Olof after its central
figure, the Luther of Sweden.

From a dramatic point of view it would have been hard to pick a more
promising period than the one he had chosen as a setting for his play.
The early reign of Gustaf Vasa, the founder of modern Sweden, was marked
by three parallel conflicts of equal intensity and interest: between
Swedish and Danish nationalism; between Catholicism and Protestantism;
and, finally, between feudalism and a monarchis