SOURCE: Törnqvist, Egil. “The Strindbergian One-Act Play.” Scandinavian Studies 68, no. 3 (summer 1996): 356-69.

In the following essay, Törnqvist examines Strindberg's one-act plays.

Strindberg's international reputation as a dramatist is usually connected with two enterprises. Before the so-called Inferno Crisis in the mid-1890s, he was an eminent representative of naturalist drama. His famous preface to Fröken Julie [Miss Julie] is generally recognized along with Zola's Le Naturalisme au théâtre as its most important manifesto. After the Inferno Crisis, he penned his preexpressionist plays, in which the protagonists are more in conflict with themselves and with the Powers, as Strindberg termed them, than with each other. Both enterprises have been rather extensively researched.

Strindberg's two other notable contributions to modern drama have received considerably less attention and recognition. I refer to his cycle of plays about the Swedish royals—we would have to go to Shakespeare...