sively. 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.

Although Strindberg's main object in working over his play undoubtedly
was to obtain its production, the metrical version was not put on the
stage until 1890, when, however, it was performed at the Royal Theatre,
toward which its author had looked so longingly and so vainly eighteen
years earlier. The prose version, on the other hand, was produced as
early as 1881, at the New Theatre in Stockholm, but was not published
until the same year, when it appeared in book form grouped with a number
of other writings from Strindberg's earliest period.

Of the five unprinted versions connecting the original prose drama
of 1872 with the final metrical form of 1878, more or less complete
manuscripts have been preserved, and these are now being examined in
detail by the Swedish literary historian, Professor Karl Warburg. A
summary analysis by Dr. John Landquist is appended to the second
volume of the definitive edition of Strindberg's complete works (Albert
Bonnier, Stockholm), where the epilogue to the metrical version is also
reprinted after so many years of oblivion.

"Of all the manuscripts preceding the final metrical version," says Dr.
Landquist, "the original one, written when Strindberg was twenty-three,
is the masterpiece. There everything is consistent; there the dialogue
has a power and an incisiveness to which it does not attain in any of
the unprinted manuscripts. On the contrary, these seem more youthful
than the original, producing at times an impression of immaturity and
uncertainty on the part of the author. Even when some isolated phrase
strikes one as fortunate, it does not tend to strengthen the drama as
a whole. The later versions lack that sense of inner unity and that
audacious touch which lend fascination and power to the original
manuscript.

"