Strindberg’s Historical Imagination: Erik XIV

Strindberg’s Historical Imagination: Erik XIV Michael W. Kaufman I At the end of the nineteenth century to study history was still to believe that the historian’s highest commitment was to Truth, and that invariably the right historical method would dis­ close the formal coherence of man’s life in time. To be sure, by the 1890’s methods of attaining truth and discovering universal principles of order were anything but uniform. Positivists like Ranke, Comte, Marx, and Mill argued that history was merely another branch of natural science and that the past should be studied from a sound basis of experimentally verifiable laws. For Idealists like Hegel, Croce, and Dilthey, on the other hand, his­ tory was a human not a mathematical science, and thus the historian had to get “inside” the past, to write history in Leopold von Ranke’s term “as it actually was” by reliving or rethinking what happened and why. Still, no matter what differences in methodology or philosophy existed, nineteenth-century European historical thought “represented an effort to constitute history as the ground for a ‘realistic’science of man, society, and culture”;! almost without exception men accepted that history was pro­ ceeding in a more-or-less coherent direction toward some teleol­ ogy, and that historical events could be made to yield their ultimate meaning. Strindberg’s position at century’s end made it possible for him to know all the important developments of nineteenth-cen­ tury historiography. Indeed, he was remarkably well read in history, an interest he maintained right up to his final years.2 Early in his life Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England had made a profound impression upon Strindberg 318 Michael W. Kaufman 319 when it first appeared in Swedish in 1871. It was with Buckle’s book before him that Strindberg revamped his early drafts and produced his first significant drama, the prose Master Olof (1872). During the eighties Strindberg undertook a comprehen­ sive study of Swedish history partly because of his dissatisfaction with the official versions which he felt had reduced Sweden to the history of its kings.3 By 1881-82 Strindberg published his own two volume Kulturgeschichte, The Swedish People. The next decade produced his seige of profound depression and now history became something of a therapy to ameliorate his psychic pain. As Strindberg later wrote to his German publisher, Emil Schering, about his Inferno crisis, “as a means of killing time I read right through world history.”4 After he had completed his series of royal historical dramas, Strindberg published a long essay, “The Mysticism of World History” (1903), which com­ bined a Swedenborgian mysticism with the Schopenhauerean theme of Conscious Will in the form of higher powers that mys­ teriously govern the universe. Almost always Strindberg’s interest in history and its mean­ ing led him to accept an ultimate design evident in the course of events. The very scope of his planned historical cycle, stretching from St. Erik to Gustav Adolph IV, some seven and a half cen­ turies of Swedish history, attests to Strindberg’s interest in dis­ covering causal pattern amidst complex chains of events. This reason alone makes Erik XIV (1899) a striking exception in Strindberg’s historical canon. Contrary to the dominant thought of his age and his own inclinations to embrace a providential destiny for mankind, Erik XIV emerges as an ironic critique of traditional nineteenth-century historicism in its skepticism about coherent designs in history and its extreme doubt about whether any light or shape pertains to human existence at all. The plot of Erik XIV appears tantalizingly simple: the play records the last years of the reign of Gustav Vasa’s heir, depicting Erik’s strug­ gles with his half-brothers and the powerful Swedish nobles, climaxing with his deposition and the ascension of John III.5 But in the course of its chronicle Erik XIV progresses to the brink of the grotesque, broaching a nearly apocalyptic confron­ tation of Erik with his role, and by extension, of Strindberg with history. In a deeper sense it is Strindberg’s other historical works which are anomalies and Erik XIV which marks the...