Strindberg, August
Strindberg, August (1849–1912),Swedish playwright. Influenced by Hagberg's 1847 translation and Brandes's 1896 biographical study, he came to regard Shakespeare as ‘my teacher’. Strindberg only ever saw four plays in performance, but regarded Hamlet as ‘a revelation, and a milestone in my gloomy life’. His five Open Letters to the Intimate Theatre (1908–9, collected 1919) also refer to Shakespeare's tragedies and histories, which inspired his own cycle of plays on Swedish history. The plot and situation of his misogynistic masterpiece The Father (1887)—the destruction of a military man by paranoid sexual jealousy—irresistibly suggest Othello.
Tom Matheson
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