After some months, during which Strindberg was only a super, he was heartily tired of the whole thing. The mechanism, living and dead, of dramatic production disgusted him. He felt repressed and misjudged. But at the same time he was ashamed of quitting the profession which he had chosen with such high expectations. He demanded his right to be tried and judged. He was given an important part and a special rehearsal, at which he appeared without stage costume and without the requisite enthusiasm. The elder actors resented the arrangement, and Strindberg shouted his sentences in a manner which made it clear that he was in need of further instruction. He was advised to resume his pupilage. But this he would not do. The humiliation was unbearable. He cried with rage and decided to commit suicide. An opium pill which he had treasured with a view to the possibility of having to summon a catastrophic end to life's difficulties was utilised for the purpose, but failed altogether of a calamitous effect. A friend, who knew the better way, re-awakened Strindberg's interest in earthly existence through a merry drinking bout. On the following day, he tells us, he felt bruised, wounded, tom, with quivering nerves and with the fever of shame and drunkenness in his veins. He lay on his sofa reading Topelius' _Tales of a Surgeon_ and musing over his own troubles. His brain worked at high pressure, sorting memories, adding and eliminating, calling out personalities. He heard his characters speak. It was as if he saw them on a stage. After a few hours he had visualised a comedy in two acts, and in four days the play was written. "It was a work," he writes in _Fermentation Time_, "at once painful and pleasurable, if it even could be called work, for it came of itself, without his will or effort." "And when the piece was ready," he tells us, "he drew a deep sigh, as if years of pain were over, as if an abscess had been lanced. He was so happy that something sang within him, and he decided to send his piece to the theatre. This was the salvation." Macaulay thought that books are written either to relieve the fulness of the mind or the emptiness of the pocket. He ignored the intimate correlation between the two motives. The full mind is only too often made inarticulate by the empty pocket, whilst, on the other hand, the empty pocket sometimes accelerates processes of the mind which, but for that stimulus, would never reach fulness. Strindberg was throughout life the slave of a full mind and an empty pocket. His first effort in drama had now to be submitted to competent criticism. He prepared the garret which he rented from the doctor for the festive reception of two wise friends. A clean napkin on the table, two candles and a bottle of "punsch" were the outer signs of the solemnity with which he welcomed his critics. The play was read to the end in sympathetic silence. The friends then saluted August as an author.