SOURCE: Grabowski, Simon. “Unreality in Plays of Ibsen, Strindberg and Hamsun.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas 4, no. 2 (winter 1970): 63-8.

In the following essay, Grabowski explores Strindberg's innovative departure from realism in A Dream Play.

I

Towards and around the turn of the century, three leading Scandinavian authors were venturing, each in his own way, into a kind of drama which has traditionally been referred to as one of symbolism. The two older of the three, Ibsen and Strindberg, had already become established as dramatists of the foremost rank, while the third, Knut Hamsun, had only recently won fame as the author of three intensely lyrical novels, Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), and Pan (1894). Between the two latter works, Hamsun had published two straightforwardly realistic novels, Editor Lynge and Shallow Soil, and with At the Gates of the Kingdom (Ved Rikets Port, 1895), the introductory play in...