The cycle of the Vasa plays--_Master Olof_, _Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_--bears the mark of the consummate craftsman. Their strength is the strength of reality, their beauty a perfect proportion of dramatic construction. A row of historical plays followed: _Gustavus Adolphus_ (1900); _Engelbrecht_ (1901); _Charles XII_ (1901); _Gustavus III_ (1903); _Queen Christina_ (1903); _The Nightingale of Wittenberg_ (1903); _The Last Knight_ (1908); _The National Director_ (1909); _The Earl of Bjälbo_ (1909). Of these, _Gustavus Adolphus_ with its breadth of battlefield panorama; _Charles XII_ with its narrow searchlight on the declining figure of the lion-hearted, but beaten king; _Queen Christina_ with its flamboyant sketch of the clever and capricious daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, are eminently playable. _Gustavus III_ has pointed dialogue, cameo-like pictures of word-fencing; it faithfully paints the decadent time when Sweden was steeped in the sterile scepticism of France; it portrays the reaction which led to the assassination of the King of Masquerades, but the play is not woven with the dramaturgic skill of the former dramas. _The Last Knight_ is an historical jugglery with ideas in five acts which strains the dramatic form beyond its measure of elasticity. * * * * * It would require a separate volume to deal adequately with Strindberg's historical writings. It is not only his dramas which bear testimony to the originality of his historical conception, but a number of treatises, essays, and stories, such as _Studies in the History of Culture, The Swedish People, Swedish Destinies and Adventures, Historical Miniatures_, and _The Conscious Will in the History of the World_. His independent historical researches unearthed documents and accumulated evidence with a painstaking thoroughness which should have endowed him with a special "authority." But he has been derided and abused because of his lack of a truly professorial treatment of historical characters. His powers of visualisation and interpretation have given offence to historical specialists. He has been accused of distorting the calm faces of royal personages, of encumbering his pictures of the past with ugly and unnecessary details. He has been condemned because there is a twentieth-century atmosphere about his characters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we may well ask: Has any historical chronicler or dramatist ever given a faithful representation of the past except through the medium of his own personality, his own time? There are anachronisms in _Hamlet_; so there are in _Eric XIV_. In a wider sense, all historical writings are anachronistic. In that sense Strindberg's history is less burdened with errors than that of most writers. The offence which Strindberg committed--if it be an offence--is that he saw and threw upon the canvas the lasting psychological features which persist through the