Together with Norway's Henrik Ibsen and Russia's Anton Chekhov, Sweden's August Strindberg (1849-1912) has long been recognized as a leading dramatist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Of these three, Strindberg has proven the most seminal to the development of modern drama.

What is less known is that throughout his adult life, Strindberg frequently commented on drama and theatre in general and on his own plays and the staging of them in particular. Two such texts are widely distributed and frequently reprinted, the preface to Miss Julie, often hailed as the manifesto of modern drama, and the prefatory note to A Dream Play, outlining the techniques of what later became known as dramatic expressionism. But a host of others are virtually unknown to an English-speaking audience. This regrettable oversight motivates the present book, which is being published at an auspicious moment in Strindberg scholarship. The Swedish edition of Strindberg's letters in 22 carefully annotated volumes is now complete and most of the projected 72 volumes in a new scholarly edition of his collected works have been published, including virtually all of the plays as well as the volume entitled Teater och Intima Teatern (Theatre and the Intimate Theatre). Both editions provide a firm underpinning for this source book.

Selections include most of Strindberg's significant statements on drama and theatre. Most, but not all, for we have tried to avoid repetitiveness by limiting, for example, similar statements to different addressees and by leaving out certain technical descriptions related to specific productions.

Moreover, our volume does not include texts which have only thematic relevance to Strindberg's plays. A concrete example may illustrate this point. In his A Blue Book I (1907), one of the short pieces – there are hundreds of them – is entitled “A Whole Life in an Hour.” Here the narrator describes how he one morning, “obeying an exhortation,” went for a walk in town, seemingly at random. He passed the neighborhood where he was born and had been educated, where he had worked as a teacher, where he was accepted as an actor, where he handed in his first play, where he married his first wife, and where his third wife and their child had been living three years earlier.