Strindberg’s Historical Imagination: Erik XIV

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century to study history still to believe that the historian's highest commitment to Truth, and that invariably the right historical method would disclose the formal coherence of man's life in time. To be sure, by the 1890's methods of attaining truth and discovering universal principles of order were anything but uniform. Positivists like Ranke, Comte, Marx, and Mill argued that history merely another branch of natural science and that the past should be studied from a sound basis of experimentally verifiable laws. For Idealists like Hegel, Croce, and Dilthey, on the other hand, history a human not a mathematical science, and thus the historian had to get inside the past, to write history in Leopold von Ranke's term it actually was by reliving or rethinking what happened and why. Still, no matter what differences in methodology or philosophy existed, nineteenth-century European historical thought represented an effort to constitute history as the ground for a 'realistic' science of man, society, and culture;! almost without exception men accepted that history proceeding in a more-or-less coherent direction toward some teleology, and that historical events could be made to yield their ultimate meaning. Strindberg's position at century's end made it possible for him to know all the important developments of nineteenth-century historiography. Indeed, he remarkably well read in history, an interest he maintained right up to his final years.2 Early in his life Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England had made a profound impression upon Strindberg