SOURCE: Wikander, Matthew H. “Strindberg's Gustav III: The Player King on the Stage of History.” Modern Drama 30 no. 1 (March 1987): 80-9.

[In the following essay, Wilkander critiques Gustav III.]

Strindberg's interest in Sweden's Gustav III, founder of the Swedish Academy and both the Royal Opera and the Royal Theatre, began in 1882 with the Royal Theatre's plans to celebrate its centenary by presenting two of Gustav's plays. “Since Herr Josephson altered the program for the festival in September so that it became an ovation for instead of a protest against Gustav III and his so-called creation,” he wrote in a letter to Josephson, “I am prevented in every way from participating, since I have, in two special forthcoming works, made a fool of both this king I despise and his ‘Creation.’”¹ The young playwright's hostile portraits of Gustav III in The Swedish People and of the Royal Theatre in The New Kingdom did indeed soon follow. Twenty years later, Strindberg presented his Gustav III to the Royal Theatre; “It cannot be right,” declared the censor, Nils Bonde, “to slander on this stage the great patron and progenitor of the Royal Theatre,” and the play was rejected.² The rejection of Gustav III was more a response to Strindberg's notorious baiting of the Swedish Academy than an objection to the play itself. For in the intervening years, Strindberg's attitude towards Gustav III had become considerably more complex. What the play presents is not the derision and anger of the young Strindberg, but rather an attempt on the part of the mature Strindberg to see Gustav III and his theatre from a perspective governed by the researches into history which he would soon publish as “The Mysticism of World History” in 1903. Far from being a satirical attack upon Sweden's player-king, Gustav III offers a serious critique of the problems of acting and action in the theatre and in the world.

The play is set in 1789, on the days leading up to Gustav III's royalist seizure of power. With his usual delight in ironic coincidence, Strindberg emphasizes the parallelism between this event and the fall of the Bastille. From first to last, Gustav's absolutist coup d'état is presented against its historical background as an inappropriate coup de théâtre; over the course of the play the king's role shifts from that of playwright, managing events and news, to that of actor, forced to perform the role of assassin's victim in a script he neither controls nor understands.

As the play opens, the king's enemies gather at Holmberg's bookstore, welcoming the news of unrest in Paris and of Washington's election. “Can something new be happening in the world?” wonders Holmberg.³ The hopes of the group seem to have been answered by accounts of Gustav's deposition; “The comedy is ended!” Holmberg exclaims (p. 246) in a line that will become a refrain for the whole play. But the accounts of Gustav's defeats are false; he lands victorious, and the act ends with news of the executions of the officers who conspired against him. The bookstore is closed. The unseen king masterfully re-establishes his power, although there is a latent threat in the act's last moment, as the revolutionary poet Thorild is left alone on stage, contemplating the bust of Rousseau.

In the second act, we are given our first look at the king himself, in his audience-room at the palace at Haga. The room is decorated with a mirror and a bust of Voltaire: under the watchful eyes of himself and of the philosopher, Gustav rehearses his appearance. He greets each of his visitors in a different manner. “Elis,” he says to State Secretary Schröderheim, “do you believe that a person of high station could or should remain in a marriage which brings him only dishonor and ridicule?” (p. 256). Thinking that the king is referring to his own unhappy marriage, Schröderheim recommends a divorce, only to discover that he has been tricked into agreeing to divorce Lady Schröderheim. “He's written a new play,” says the king later to Lady Schröderheim, “with a leading role for you!” (p. 261). Eagerly she runs off to discover that the playwright is the king, not her husband, and that her role will be disgrace. The king's solution for his other political problems will be theatrical as well; he plans to dress in Dalecarlian costume and rally the Dalesmen to his support, just as his ancestor Gustav Vasa had done. “Not badly constructed,” says his favorite, Armfelt, of the stratagem, “considered as a play.” “Who knows?” replies the king, “maybe it is a play, all of it.” “The last act, have you got that yet?” asks Armfelt. “That will come of itself,” answers the player-king (p. 263).

Thus both the first and second acts present the king's duplicitous role-playing as a kind of improvisatory playwriting by means of which he manipulates opinion and controls events. But there are notes of foreboding: Thorild's revolutionary fervor and Armfelt's misgivings hint that events may have an impetus of their own. The play's third act, set at the home of Clas Horn, dramatizes a meeting of the conspirators; making an appropriately theatrical gesture, the king interrupts the conclave. “Soyons amis, Cinna, c'est moi qui t'en convie,” he declaims, quoting from the scene in Corneille's Cinna in which Auguste confronts his would-be assassin. “Pour être plus qu'un roi, tu te crois quelque chose,” replies Baron Pechlin, not to be outdone. But Gustav is unaware that Jakob Anckarström (who in history assassinated Gustav III with a pistol loaded with rusty nails at a masked ball in 1792) is hiding on the veranda. He feels some discomfiture, and asks if there is a cat in the room. The conspirators suggest that it might be the ghost of Göran Persson, advisor to Erik XIV, king of Sweden who went mad and was forcibly deposed in the sixteenth century. Gustav departs: “The exit was not so impressive as the entrance,” jokes Baron Pechlin, “but that happens to even the best of actors” (p. 266).

In the final act, at Gustav's fête champêtre at Drottningholm, the king's loss of control becomes apparent. The troops whom he has expected to arrest the conspirators disband, the guests publicly rejoice at the news of the fall of the Bastille, scurrilous pamphlets questioning the paternity of the crown prince appear in the king's own room. The play's last scene is ironic not only in historical but also in explicitly theatrical terms. As the play ends, the king is shadowed in his movements by Anckarström, who lurks outside and takes aim at him with a pistol. This time he cannot get off a good shot, as the queen keeps stepping into the line of fire. “The queen is the most powerful piece in the game,” quips Gustav, unaware of the assassin's presence, “and her function is protecting the king” (p. 276).

The reduction of Gustav from manipulator of events in the early acts of the play to the status of king in a chess-game reaches out to Strindberg's “Mysticism of World History,” in which history appears as “a colossal chess-game, with a solitary player moving both black and white.”⁴ In these essays, Strindberg delineates a view of history which is thoroughly providential: a conscious will directs events; human freedom and agency are merely illusory. The introduction of the metaphor of the chess-game into the final stage-picture of Gustav III vividly presents an image of Gustav's entrapment in history. Anckarström will ultimately succeed; the king's establishment of absolutism, incongruous and inappropriate in the historical context of the fall of the Bastille, will ultimately fail.

The play's last lines enhance Strindberg's historical vision with a metatheatrical dimension. “Wasn't there someone named Brutus?” quips the queen in response to the king's assertion that he has been born with “Caesar's luck” (p. 276). These lines grow out of a complex system of reference in the play to two Renaissance tragedies of assassination, Corneille's Cinna and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. As an actor and playwright himself, the historical Gustav relied upon the traditional language of the world as theatre, and one of his favorite roles was Cinna in Corneille's play. Thus when Strindberg calls upon the trope of theatrum mundi in his play, he does so against a specific background of allusion. Gustav's quotations from Cinna in the third act put him in the role of Auguste, who in Corneille's play overwhelms the would-be assassin with masterful clemency. But Baron Pechlin, cast by Gustav as Cinna in that scene, generates a reference to Shakespeare's tragedy: “Brutus, brutal Brutus,” he cries when Anckarström reveals his plan to kill the king (p. 267). Strindberg's reading of Julius Caesar was highly individual: the play showed him that “Shakespeare is a providentialist just as the ancient writers of tragedy were,” he wrote in his Letters to the Intimate Theatre, “so he does not depart from history without making sure that divine justice has been distributed even to the point of pettiness.”⁵ Thinking himself to be playing the part of the heroic, self-mastering emperor in Corneille's play, Strindberg's Gustav will find himself trapped in a world that Strindberg sees as Shakespearean, in which individuals are the playthings of an inscrutable Providence. He will be a Julius Caesar, the assassin's victim, not an embodiment, like Corneille's Auguste, of prudent enlightened rule.

The idea of miscasting is of special interest here because of the substantial body of plays written and acted in by the historical Gustav III. The plays of Gustav III featured monarchs who were heroic lovers, sacrificing all to deliver their people from bondage, national liberators like Gustav Vasa and Gustav Adolf. Determined to create a national drama independent of the French, Gustav wrote Swedish historical dramas with the help of various court poets. Gustav Adolf's Magnanimity, his first Swedish play, was performed by the lords and ladies of the court in 1783. The title makes clear the play's connection to the tradition of ideal rulers like Corneille's Auguste. In 1785, Gustav returned to this subject in Gustav Adolf and Ebba Brahe; here the king loses the woman he loves as his return to court is delayed while he rescues a peasant from drowning. It is the peasant's wedding day; it should have been the king's as well, but Ebba Brahe misinterprets his letters and his absence and consents to a loveless marriage. Gustav Vasa, versified by the poet Kellgren who makes a brief appearance in Strindberg's play, was performed in 1786 as the first Swedish language opera; it played twenty-three performances to full houses. Forced to choose between liberating his country and his love for his mother, Gustav frees Sweden and also manages to save her life. Despite the patriotic subject-matter of these plays, French models lurk behind all of them. Voltaire's Charlot provided the plot of Gustav Adolf's Magnanimity; Collé's Parti de Chasse de Henri IV offered the scenes with the peasantry in Gustav Adolf and Ebba Brahe; echoes of Corneille's Le Cid and Cinna abound in Gustav Vasa.⁶

This is not surprising in light of the thorough immersion in French culture of Gustav III's court. Oskar Levertin's Theatre and Drama under Gustav III, first published in 1889, characterized Gustavian tragedy as “slavish imitation of Voltaire”;⁷ Strindberg, who thought of Levertin as a member of the Swedish literary establishment and thus an enemy, may nonetheless have consulted this book in his work on the play. Particularly well-documented and of special interest in relation to Strindberg's Gustav III are the amateur dramatic performances that occupied the court's attention over the Christmas and New Year's holidays of 1775-76 at Gripsholm. “At the end of a performance,” grumbled Axel Fersen, one member of the nobility reluctant to share in the Gustavian reforms which ceded much of the aristocrats' power to the monarchy, “the king, together with the whole court, comes out for supper dressed in costume. Thus we have seen him dressed as Rhadamiste, Cinna, and the high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, presenting himself as an object of ridicule at his own table.”⁸ Strindberg's Gustav imagines himself to be Corneille's Auguste in Cinna; from Levertin or from Fersen's Memoirs, which he mentions needing to consult for his story on Gustav III in Swedish Destinies and Adventures, Strindberg might have learned that the historical Gustav played the title role.⁹

The alteration in casting may be accidental on Strindberg's part or it may be deliberate. In either case, what is striking is Strindberg's insistence upon role-reversal and miscasting as the dominant rhetorical figure in his play. “Full of contradictions,” is how Strindberg summed up Gustav III in his Letters to the Intimate Theatre, “a tragedian who played comedy in his life; a hero and a dancing-master; an absolutist who loved freedom; a fighter for human rights; a disciple of Frederick the Great, Joseph II, and Voltaire.”¹⁰ The description is a précis of the characterization of Gustav III in “A Royal Revolution,” the short story devoted to Gustav in Strindberg's Swedish Destinies and Adventures; there, too, the king is “above all, a comedian and declaimer.”¹¹ In his prose summaries of Gustav, Strindberg emphasizes the paradoxical incompatibility between role and player on the historical stage. Gustav's aims and reforms are out of step with his times. “The Bastille has fallen,” exclaims Armfelt, the king's favorite, in the last act of the play, “and Gustav the third establishes absolutism! … What a paradox!” (p. 271). Strindberg himself might have delighted in the fact, reported by Levertin, that a professional performance of Gustav's Gustav Vasa in Norrköping in 1795 inspired the audience to sing “La Marseillaise.”¹² In Gustav III, the king's garden party in the final act is interrupted by an outburst of rejoicing: Louis XVI has been taken prisoner; “And that's why my guests are celebrating? In my Versailles?” asks Gustav. Outside, the voices are raised in “La Carmagnole.”

Strindberg's whole play explores the idea of acting, blurring distinctions between acting as performance and acting as historical action. Martin Lamm was the first of the play's critics to sense in it a high degree of artificiality; Gustav III he pronounced to be “historical comedy in the style of Scribe,” and he did not mean this characterization as praise. Walter Johnson, later, also noticed structural similarities between Gustav III and the historical comedies of Scribe, but for Johnson these could be understood as functional rather than as artistic weaknesses, “conveying the artificiality of a highly formalized court and the artificiality of the king's behavior.”¹³ Neither Lamm nor Johnson had looked to Gustav III's own dramas, with their misplaced letters, secret hiding places, and manufactured misunderstandings. But to Agne Beijer, an expert in Gustavian theatre, these “comedies of intrigue in historical costume” clearly anticipated the work of Scribe, and one of the standard histories of Swedish literature notices multiple affinities between Gustav's plays and mid-nineteenth-century French theatre.¹⁴ Drawing upon the same models, Voltairean tragedy and the bourgeois comédie larmoyante, Gustav created a remarkably Scribean drama. Strindberg's quotations from Cinna in Gustav III and the decision of Gustav III to imitate Gustav Vasa by dressing in Dalecarlian costume to rally the Dalesmen in his support appear to have clear sources in the dramatic activities of the historical Gustav. So, too, the play's Scribean overtones may be better understood as Gustavian.

The play is framed by the operatic refrain “The comedy is ended”; this response to the false rumors of Gustav's deposition in the first act is echoed by Countess Schröderheim in the last act. “I'm not anywhere,” she says to her husband, “but I'm standing here—standing on my own grave—like a cross on my grave—with the mask in my hand—unmasked—oh, the comedy is ended; and no one applauds” (p. 273). The mask she carries is real enough: she has just appeared before the king as Megaera, accompanied by the three Graces in a rather jarring moment of amateur acting. As a court Fury she is also a Shakespearean soothsayer; the line with which she has greeted Gustav is “Beware the Ides of March, Caesar!” (p. 269). But the part she gives up in this later scene is her whole role as a lady of the court. Schröderheim, who was tricked into divorcing her by Gustav, can only pity her loss of social identity and status: “There's nothing left of Lady Schröderheim,” he says; “now begins Lady Stapelmohr, the extension of Miss Stapelmohr.” Her married life has been an illusory entr'acte, symbolized by the putting on and taking off of a name.

This identification of social role or name as mask and life as a play is stressed by Fersen, who in Strindberg's play shares the anti-theatrical bias of the historical Axel Fersen. “It's masquerade here all year round, apparently,” says Fersen later in the fourth act, as Halldin passes by wearing a mask. “And the king—he was taught to lie when he was a child, particularly during the court's unsuccessful grabs for power. I was there then. And ever since he's lied himself away, so that he doesn't know who he is himself; because he makes a joke out of everything, he can't tell the difference between what's serious and what's a joke” (p. 274). Like Lady Schröderheim, the king without a mask is no one; her performance as the Fury, warning Gustav of the Ides of March, circumscribes both actors in a masque of Caesar and Brutus in which both are reluctant players. The two, linked by the refrain “The comedy is ended,” both figure the finality of that end.

The refrain also has connections with Strindberg's attitude towards Gustav's period in history, the eighteenth century. “La comedia e finita!” exclaims Voltaire in “The Seven Fat Years,” Strindberg's account of his last days at the court of Frederick the Great in the Historical Miniatures.¹⁵ Voltaire's activities as a spy have been found out, and he has just been forced to leave. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” says Doctor de la Mettrie. Many years later, the story resumes; in his house at Ferney, Voltaire receives a letter from Frederick. The seven fat years have been supplanted by the Seven Years' War; Frederick's ideals of enlightened despotism are in ruins. “This century, which saw all of Europe's monarchs marching at the head of revolutionary movements, is the strangest of all,” Frederick writes. “We despots, who forced enlightenment and freedom upon our people, we were demagogues, and the people have rewarded us with ingratitude” (p. 306). Frederick the Great and Gustav III, as we have seen, were always linked in Strindberg's thought. “I dare not draw conclusions from these experiences,” he continues, “for that would be to choose Barabbas and crucify Christ … Great men, small weaknesses; or better yet: great weaknesses. We, monsieur, have not been angels, but Providence has called us to great things” (p. 308). Frederick's apparent loss of faith after seven lean years of defeat and disillusion illuminates the cynicism of his nephew and disciple, Gustav III.

Unlike Gustav, Frederick for Strindberg was a world-historical individual, a man of providence; late in 1903, as he was preparing a second edition of Gustav III for the press, Strindberg was also enthusiastically planning a drama on Frederick the Great. This was to be one of his cycle of three trilogies of five-act plays on world-historical figures; the cycle was never concluded, although Strindberg did complete for it plays on Moses, Socrates, Christ, and Luther. Requesting of Emil Schering biographies and other materials to help in the project (“I've already read Voltaire's bitchy letters,” he volunteers), Strindberg delineates the kind of project it would be: “His life is an Odyssey and an Iliad, so a long dramatic epic—which I will model on Götz for Shakespeare-Bühne'n” (his enthusiasm for the idea leads Strindberg to continue the letter in German).¹⁶ “Strindberg was a great man,” said John Landquist, his first editor, in an article about the hostile reception given the first performances of Gustav III by its critics, “and so he loved great men: especially really great men, like Gustav Vasa or Luther, but he also understood fragile men, who like Gustav III struggled passionately against greatness.”¹⁷

Strindberg's ideas about “great men” as they are presented in “The Mysticism of World History” are highly dependent upon Hegel's theory of world-historical individuals, who, like Caesar “acted instinctively to bring to pass that which the times required.” “The source of their actions is the inner spirit,” Hegel continues, “still hidden beneath the surface but already knocking against the outer world as against a shell …”.¹⁸ Like a Hegelian hero, Strindberg's Frederick the Great finishes his career unhappy, but in tune with a higher plan: “History progresses like an avalanche,” he writes to Voltaire, “the species is improved, the conditions of life become better, but mankind remains the same: faithless, ungrateful, depraved, and the righteous and the unrighteous can both go to hell” (p. 307). The sense of history's plan working out despite human agency and through the instinctive responses of great men—men of providence in Strindberg's language—infuses both “The Mysticism of World History” and “The Seven Fat Years.”

The artificiality and theatricality of Gustav III (his responses are clearly not instinctive) are represented before a backdrop of significant human change and progress of which the audience is forcibly made aware throughout the play. The bust of Rousseau in Holmberg's bookstore and the bust of Voltaire in Gustav's audience-chamber direct our attention, like the references to France and America, to the period's most important individuals and ideas. “I'm the rabble-rouser,” Gustav announces to Ole Olsson in the second act:

… the democrat, the hater of the nobility, the first citizen of a free land! A man of the people, defender of the oppressed. I'm Rousseau's disciple … and Voltaire's. The social contract—Le Contrat Social—is my gospel, I keep it on my night-table! George Washington is my friend, Franklin my ideal. There you have me!

As Strindberg pointed out in all of his writings on Gustav III, this self-image is a paradoxical and willful miscasting: as absolutist revolutionary, Gustav turns his back on the course of history as the rest of Europe struggles towards liberty. Strindberg found in Gustav's period an extraordinary harmony of ideas—“the spirit of the times, all-powerful,” he writes of the eighteenth century in “The Mysticism of World History,” “takes hold of all the senses, compels all ideas into harmony; and the human race awakens again” (p. 377). The news reports that Washington has been elected and that the Bastille has fallen—true accounts which are confused with the false reports of Gustav's deposition by the conspirators in the first act—reflect this universal drive for liberty. “Can't you see that he's playing Mirabeau and throwing dust in our eyes?” exclaims Anckarström in the second act; “he's performing the French Revolution on stage, he is, the king! It's totally perverse, just like him!” (p. 264). The king's surprise entrance is well-timed: his voice is heard off-stage, joining in the on-stage “Bravo!” as Horn reads to the others from “The Rights of Man” (pp. 265-66).

In addition to Mirabeau, the king arrogates to himself a more perversely revolutionary role in the language of the play. He recalls to the queen the success of his revolution of 1772, in which he restored the monarchy to a share in the government: “I remember that you wept when I sent my chamberlain to Ekolsund to tell you about my successful revolution—when I played Brutus to those homespun Caesars” (p. 262). As Gustav's roles mount, their incompatibility with their times and with each other becomes dazzling. “It was just recently that a court poet compared me with Gustav Vasa, our liberator from foreign powers,” he tells the queen; “there may be a grain of truth in the flattery.” At the end of the scene he looks over his Dalesman's costume, but whether he will be playing Gustav Vasa, Brutus, Corneille's Auguste or Cinna, or Shakespeare's Caesar for the rest of the play is in doubt. “But the last act,” Armfelt asks, “have you got that yet?” “That will come of itself,” replies the king; “That will come of itself,” repeats Armfelt (p. 263). The player-king resigns himself to the status of actor in a script that will “come of itself.” Metaphorically, the script is history, and Gustav's role in history is under scrutiny.

All the stage-sets of Gustav III invite scrutiny; they are glass houses, open to view. Holmberg's bookstore is characterized by a constant rush of activity as news from abroad arrives, both false and true. “At the back are windows and open glass doors overlooking the harbor; there masts and sails can be seen,” reads the stage direction (p. 245). Gustav's audience-room in the palace at Haga is the scene of the second act: “the whole back wall consists of open glass doors, through which can be seen the park and Brunnviken” (p. 251). Even the conspirators' meeting in the third act takes place in a large room with “open glass doors leading out to a large wooden veranda”—this is where Anckarström lurks during the king's appearance—“overlooking the garden” (p. 263). The last act takes place in the Chinese pavilion at Drottningholm: “the doors at the back stand open overlooking the park” (p. 267). The overall effect is one of openness and fresh air; yet again in the fourth act Anckarström lurks unseen outside the open doors.

Liberty and freedom transform themselves thus from words bandied about by the enlightened king and his opponents into metaphors in the stage set itself and into major issues in the play's dramatic representation of history. The play begins with discussion of the king's new restrictions of freedom of the press; his highsounding promises in 1772 are contrasted with current repressions. But the play ends with disturbing reference to such freedoms: just before Anckarström appears at the back, the king finds a scurrilous pamphlet distributed by Halldin questioning the paternity of his son. “This is horrible,” he exclaims, “but there's nothing anyone can do about it!” “No,” agrees Armfelt, leaving, “nothing” (p. 276). All the king's reforms seem to beget abuses; his establishment of absolutism on the next day will appear itself to be an abuse of power rather than a liberal reform. What action is possible to him is ironic in the deepest sense, out of step with the great movements of his age.

In his use of theatrical metaphor and revival of the world-as-stage image in Gustav III Strindberg then engages in a serious critique of the Renaissance idea of the theater as a center of a court, center of a culture, center of a world, as well as in a critique of the conservative Royal Theatre, Gustav's “creation.” For the heroic images promulgated by the historical Gustav III, Strindberg substitutes a pattern of ironic miscasting and gratuitous role-playing that stresses Gustav's incompatibility with his historical context: the European Enlightenment. Acting becomes, on the glass-house stage of Gustav's artificial world, not the world-historical individual's performance of meaningful acts but the playerking's engagement in meaningless performance, circumscribed by the ruling metaphor of the game of chess. The king Strindberg denounced as a fraud early in his career becomes a universal token of humanity's entrapment in history.

Notes

1. August Strindberg, Brev, ed. Torsten Eklund, vol. 3 (Stockholm, 1952), pp. 73-74. Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

2. Quoted and translated by Michael Meyer, in Strindberg (New York, 1985), p. 434.

3. August Strindberg, Gustav III, in Samlade Skrifter, ed. Gunnar Brandell, vol. 10 (Stockholm, 1946), p. 247. All quotations are from this edition, and subsequent references are in the text.

4. August Strindberg, “Världshistoriens mystik,” in Samlade Skrifter, ed. John Landquist, vol. 54 (Stockholm, 1920), p. 353. Subsequent references are in the text.

5. August Strindberg, Öppna Brev till Intima Teatern, in Samlade Skrifter, ed. John Landquist, vol. 50 (Stockholm, 1919), p. 114.

6. Swedish prose versions of Gustav's plays (which he often first wrote in French) are in Gustav III, Skrifter (Stockholm, 1807) vols. 2 and 3. For the production of Gustav Vasa, see Georg Nordensvän, Svensk Teater och Svensk Skådespelare, vol. 1 (Stockholm, 1917), p. 16. Oskar Levertin, in Teater och Drama under Gustaf III, 2nd ed. (Stockholm, 1911), discusses French source material, p. 106; see also detailed descriptions of individual plays in Levertin's Gustaf III som dramatisk författare (Stockholm, 1894).

7. Levertin, Teater, p. 101.

8. Levertin, Teater, p. 71.

9. August Strindberg, Brev, ed. Torsten Eklund, vol. 8 (Stockholm, 1964), pp. 187, 210.

10. Strindberg, Öppna Brev, p. 250.

11. August Strindberg, Svenska Öden och Äfventyr, vol. 3 (Stockholm, 1907), p. 535.

12. Levertin, Teater, p. 192.

13. Martin Lamm, Strindbergs Dramer, vol. 2 (Stockholm, 1926), p. 341. Walter Johnson, Strindberg and the Historical Drama (Seattle, 1963), p. 215.

14. Agne Beijer, “Gustaviansk teaterliv på Gripsholm,” in Gripsholm: Slottet och dess samlingar (Stockholm, 1937), p. 100. Henrik Schück and Karl Warburg, Illustrerad Svensk Litteraturhistoria, 3rd ed., vol. 4, Gustaviansk Tiden (Stockholm, 1928), p. 497.

15. August Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, ed. John Landquist, vol. 42, Historiska Miniatyrer (Stockholm, 1917), p. 303. Subsequent page references are in the text.

16. August Strindberg, Brev, ed. Torsten Eklund, vol. 14 (Stockholm, 1974), p. 322.

17. John Landquist, “Gustav III och kritiker,” Dagens Nyheter, 9 May 1916. Despite plans to put the play on in Strindberg's lifetime, Gustav III was first performed at the Intimate Theatre in 1916.

18. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History, translated with an introduction by Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis, 1953), pp. 39-40.