Ebook: Five Plays of August Strindberg

FIVE PLAYS OF STRINDBERG
In new translation by ELIZABETH SPRIGGE

This is the second Anchor volume of August Strindberg's
plays to appear in this country in new translations by Eliza-
beth Sprigge, whose biography of Strindberg is a standard
work. The plays she has chosen show the great range of
Strindberg's moods and style, from Creditors, a naturalistic,
rather ironic view of the corrosive effects of passion, and
The Dance of Death, a bitter and tragic expression of the
same theme, to The Great Highway, a synthesis of Strind-
berg's command of dramatic prose and his great gift for
symbolic, mystical verse.

"Strindberg still remains among the most modern of the
moderns, the greatest interpreter in the theater of the char-
acteristic spiritual conflicts which constitute the drama—
the blood—of our lives today. He carried Naturalism to a
logical attainment of such poignant intensity that, if the
work of any other playwright is to be called 'naturalism,'
we must classify a play like 'The Dance of Death' as 'super-
naturalism,' and place it in a class by itself, exclusively
Strindberg's since no one before or after him has had the
genius to qualify." Eugene O'Neill, in Provincetoicn Play-
bill, 1924