SOURCE: Mitchell, Stephen A. “The Path from Inferno to the Chamber Plays: Easter and Swedenborg.” Modern Drama 29, no. 2 (June 1986): 157-68.

In the following essay, Mitchell discusses the influence of Emmanuel Swedenborg's philosophy on Strindberg while he was writing Easter.

Response to the 1901 Swedish première of Easter, Strindberg's modern passion play, was sharply critical. Tor Hedberg, for example, complained: “The entire [play] is superficial and sentimental and concludes in a childish moral. … Those who are edified by such may be so, but for my part, I decline.”¹ Yet despite this strong negative reaction, the play has been staged many times in the past eighty years, a fact which surely reflects the delight of audiences in seeing a drama in which Strindberg has, as Walter Johnson says, made the “interpretation of the Easter message believably human and comfortingly warm.”² Clearly, the resolution of the various moral and economic dilemmas...