Plays by August Strindberg, Second series — Text and Context

The Weight of a Boot and a Bell

In the excerpt from 'Miss Julia,' the valet Jean describes his reaction to the Count's boots: 'when I see his boots standing there so stiff and perky, it is as if something made my back bend.' The boots are not props; they are agents of a hierarchy that Jean both resents and internalizes. He kicks at them, then admits the feeling is 'superstition and tradition hammered into us from childhood.' Strindberg lets the object do the work of a page of exposition.

Similarly, the Count's bell—never seen, only heard—triggers an involuntary response: 'If I only hear that bell up there, I jump like a shy horse.' Jean's body betrays him before his mind can intervene. These small, recurring details create a world where power is not debated but felt in the spine. The reader is left to watch how characters navigate a space where a glove on a chair can shrink a man.

Champagne and Calculation

The German title of 'There Are Crimes and Crimes' is 'Rausch'—intoxication—and the excerpt from 'Miss Julia' shows how Strindberg uses drink as both lubricant and accelerant. Jean urges Julia to flee with him, painting a future of 'gold pieces raining on the counter,' but his tone shifts abruptly from romance to business: 'we must look at the matter in cold blood, like sensible people.' He lights a cigar, cuts the point, and sits down to talk 'as if nothing had happened.'

The contrast is jarring. One moment he has kissed her shoe; the next he is itemizing train schedules and mocking her sentimentality. Julia, caught between desire and despair, asks, 'Have you then no feelings at all?' Jean replies, 'No one is more full of feeling than I am. But I know how to control myself.' This self-control is the play's engine: emotion is not absent but suppressed, and the suppression itself becomes a form of violence.

The Republic of the Future

Jean's plan for escape is not just personal but political. He tells Julia they must flee to a country 'where they have a republic,' because there, he imagines, 'you'll see them bend their backs double before my liveried porter.' The line reveals a bitter paradox: Jean wants to escape hierarchy only to re-create it with himself on top. His ambition is not to abolish rank but to climb it—'if I only get hold of the first branch, you'll see me do some climbing.'

He even sketches a career path: valet this year, hotel owner next, then a bought title in Roumania. 'And I may—note well that I say may—end my days as a count.' Strindberg gives Jean a voice that is both aspirational and self-aware; he knows the game he is playing, and he plays it with a cynicism that undercuts every romantic gesture. The republic he dreams of is not a society of equals but a stage on which he can perform his own rise.

These plays reward attention to what is not said—the pauses, the objects, the involuntary gestures. Strindberg's characters often speak at cross-purposes, and Björkman's translation preserves that jagged rhythm. Readers may find it useful to track how each play establishes its own set of charged objects: the boots, the bell, the cigar, the champagne. They are not decoration but dramaturgy. The tension in these works is not between good and evil but between what people say and what their bodies reveal.

There’s a particular chill in Strindberg’s late plays—that moment when a glance undoes everything, and class and desire blur into menace. It surfaces again in Night Must Fall : a Play in Three Acts — A Closer Reading, where charm hides something quieter and darker. I remember closing each book feeling watched by my own thoughts, long after the reading lamp clicked off.