AbstractThis article analyses four history plays, published between 1837 and 1869 in Sweden and Finland, and asks how the playwrights of the early nineteenth century represented the same premodern episode: the unsuccessful peasant uprising called the Club War (1596–1597). The focus is on the plays’ dramatis personae, and the article will make comparable suggestions of the themes and topics each protagonist brings to the stage. The article studies literary factors that contributed to the persistent afterlife and continuous cultural resonance of these dramatic events, and addresses the dynamics between historical fiction and scholarly history in the production of collectively meaningful pasts. As one of the results the paper demonstrates that a somewhat surprising historical hero surfaced when the 1590s were adapted in the context of a new nationalism. Methodologically the article combines computational distant reading and more traditional close reading to disclose the core characters of each play individually, and, taken together, of the early fictional ‘story space’ of the event. The article argues that even such small‐scale investigations can benefit from the systematic analytical tools offered by digital humanities that can reveal wholly new facets of the texts that more traditional literary history may overlook.