SOURCE: Jacobs, Barry. “Strindberg's Advent and Brott och brott: Sagospel and Comedy in a Higher Court.” In Strindberg and Genre, edited by Michael Robinson, pp. 167-87. Norvik Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Jacobs discusses Strindberg's comedy and fantasy plays.

In Tjänstekvinnans son, Strindberg dismisses Lycko-Pers resa, the sagospel (fairy-tale play) that had been his most popular theatre piece in Sweden, as ‘en anakronism och en konjunktur på samma gång’ (simultaneously an anachronism and a profitable enterprise—SS 19, p. 188). He seems always to have undervalued this work and to have been somewhat embarrassed by its success. In Tal till svenska nationen, he claims that because it lacks both artistic form and living characters, it is far inferior to Oehlenschläger's Aladdin, the work that inspired it (SV 68, p. 100). Therefore when Bernard Shaw tried that same year to persuade him to let Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree produce Lycko-Pers...