ABSTRACT
A dream play was begun in 1901 shortly after Johan August Strindberg’s marriage at the age of fifty-two to his third wife, the young Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse. He had emerged from the long “Inferno” period in which he had wrestled with his soul and written no plays, only scientific and alchemical treatises. In spite of his marriage and the fact that Harriet Bosse shortly bore him a child, parenthood was to him the most moving of all human experiences when Strindberg wrote a dream play he was not happy. There is more poetry both in form and language in a dream play than in to Damascus, and it is filled with imagery. Strindberg believed that if the old pattern were destroyed, a new world would rise, and the golden age of the poet and the dreamer yet be reached. Strindberg’s stage directions, even for taking characters on or off the stage, are erratic.
