The advantage to being a fanatic is that everybody remembers you for your obsession. The disadvantage is that nobody remembers you for much else. Nearly three-quarters of a century after his death, in 1912, Johan August Strindberg looms large in the public consciousness as the theater's greatest misogynist, a man who never met a woman he couldn't hate.
The bleakest of Swedes did, in fact, think of women as "whores," including his three wives. In brilliant but vitriolic plays like Miss Julie (an aristocrat lusts after her servant) and Creditors (hell in the shape of a triangle), Strindberg practices his own...