Strindberg was fifty years old when he wrote There Are Crimes and Crimes. In the same year, 1899, he produced three of his finest historical dramas: The Saga of the Folkungs, Gustavus Vasa, and Eric XIV. Just before, he had finished Advent, which he described as A Mystery, and which was published together with There Are Crimes and Crimes under the common title of In a Higher Court. Back of these dramas lay his strange confessional works, Inferno and Legends, and the first two parts of his autobiographical dream-play, Toward Damascus - all of which were finished between May, 1897, and some time in the latter part of 1898.