Robinson Michael - Miss Julie and Other Plays : And Other Plays

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

MISS JULIE AND OTHER PLAYS

JOHAN AUGUST STRINDBERG was born in Stockholm in 1849, the son of a shipping agent and a local serving-maid. After desultory studies in Uppsala, he wrote his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872. It was not performed until 1881, and supporting himself as a journalist, teacher, and librarian he eventually made his breakthrough in 1879 with The Red Room, a novel which owes much to Balzac and Dickens. He married his first wife, Siri von Essen, an actress, in 1877 and between 1883 and 1889 they lived abroad, in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark. In 1884 he was tried for blasphemy over a collection of short stories, Getting Married. His international breakthrough came with the major naturalist plays of the 1880s, The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors, but in 1892 he turned his back on Sweden and on the theatre and spent several more years abroad, devoting himself to the natural sciences and to alchemy. When he resumed writing plays in 1898 he produced twenty-two in four years. Several of these, including To Damascus (1898) and A Dream Play (1901), helped revolutionize the European theatre. He divorced Siri in 1891 but was married again, to the Austrian journalist Frida Uhl (18937) and the Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse (19014). Although best known for his plays, Strindberg was also a painter and a photographer as well as a prolific writer of novels, autobiographies, short stories, poetry, essays, and works of history, sociology, and linguistics. He was always a controversial figure in Swedish public life, and contributed, through his writing, to the discussion of a wide range of issues. On his sixty-third birthday he was honoured by a torchlight procession of workers and students, and awarded an Anti-Nobel Prize, raised by a national subscription. He died in Stockholm in 1912.

MICHAEL ROBINSON is Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of East Anglia. Formerly Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, he has published studies of Beckett and Strindberg and written widely on modern drama and theatre practice. He has also edited and translated a two-volume selection of Strindbergs Letters (1992) and an anthology of Strindbergs Essays (1996) for which he was awarded the Bernard Shaw Translation Prize in 1997.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

AUGUST STRINDBERG

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
MICHAEL ROBINSON

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Michael Robinson 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Strindberg, August, 18491912.
[Plays. English. Selections]
Miss Julie and other plays / August Strindberg; translated with
an introduction by Michael Robinson.
(Oxford worlds classics)
Contents: The fatherMiss JulieThe dance of deathA
dream playThe ghost sonata.
1. Strindberg, August, 18491912Translations into English.
I. Robinson, Michael, 1944. II. Title. III. Series: Oxford
worlds classics (Oxford University Press)
PT9811.A3R63 1998 839.726dc21 9815458
ISBN 019-2833170

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

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