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Drama
Henrik Ibsen
It would be virtually impossible
to overstate the impact Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) had on the development of
modern drama. It would be similarly difficult to exaggerate both the disdain
with which he was held by his critical and ideological opponents and the esteem
with which he was viewed by such important figures as drama critic and translator
William Archer, the playwright Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce. Responding
to the first London production of Hedda Gabler in April of 1891, Clement
Scott, drama critic for the Daily Telegraph and the Illustrated
London News, began his review in the latter with the following observation:
"A few steps out of the hospital ward, and we arrive at the dissecting-room.
Down a little lower, still a few steps lower down, and we come to the dead-house.
There, for the present, Ibsen has left us. From Ghosts to Rosmersholm,
from Rosmersholm to Hedda Gabler—who knows where the ‘master'
will lead us next? Probably into the cemetery and the grave yard, among the
evil spirits and ghouls." Identifying such criticism as this and such critics
as Scott, Shaw in his 1891 book The Quintessence of Ibsenism wonders
aloud how a dramatist could incite such denunciation. His answer? Ibsen
is a "pioneer," a social "reformer." And progress inevitably involves "the
repudiation of an established duty at every step." Committed to the status
quo—to orthodox values and notions of gender—reviewers like Scott had no choice
but to despise Ibsen.
Henrik Ibsen was born in Skien,
Norway, the second of six children to Knud and Marichen Ibsen. Ibsen's father
was then a successful merchant who owned a large general store and operated
a distillery that produced schnapps; he also dealt in imported wines and clothing.
Knud's fortunes turned for the worse, however, in 1834 when Henrik was still
a child, resulting in his near bankruptcy. The family reeled both from this
economic collapse and unseemly rumors about Henrik's illegitimacy (his mother
was said to have been carrying on an affair with an old lover, with young
Henrik as one product of their tryst). Not surprisingly, Ibsen biographer
Michael Meyer emphasizes the recurrence of financial difficulties, marital
infidelity, and illegitimacy in many of Ibsen's most influential plays: Ghosts,
Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck, and others.
After completing school at age
15, Ibsen left home and trained as an apothecary's apprentice. Some six years
later in 1850, he enrolled at the university in Christiana and published his
first play Catiline, which received favorable reviews even though the
Christiana Theatre rejected it. Ibsen's second play, however, The Warrior's
Barrow, was accepted for production (although Ibsen never seemed to like
the play and its staging was not a popular success). The young writer then
embarked upon a vigorous study of literature and writing, although the productions
of his plays were hardly inspiring. In particular, throughout the 1850s,
Ibsen turned to historical and saga material for inspiration for his plays.
Lady Inger of Østraat, produced in Bergen in 1855, was a crashing failure,
but Ibsen achieved a measure of acclaim with The Feast at Solhaug in
1856.
Moving to Rome and then Dresden
in the 1860s, Ibsen scored major triumphs with Brand in 1866 and Peer
Gynt in 1867. But the Ibsen most remembered today, the social reformer
championed by William Archer and Bernard Shaw at the end of the nineteenth
century, really arrived in 1877 with what many regard as the play that marks
his "turn" to social realism, The Pillars of Society. After this,
Ibsen created a series of searching dramas that would transform the stage
forever, plays that placed such institutions as marriage and the family under
critical scrutiny. Shaw believed that Ibsen was at least partially responsible
for the creation of a "New Woman" on the late nineteenth-century stage, a
woman who must "repudiate her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her
children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself" if she is ever
to be emancipated. This kind of woman in Ibsen's works helps destroy the
old ideal of the self-sacrificing "Womanly Woman," the slave to Man, and in
the process rids the world of illusions and lies. Nora, the long-suffering
wife in A Doll House, and Hedda Gabler are two prime examples of the
kind of character Shaw is describing.
Ibsen continued to write plays
until the turn of the twentieth century. He was partially paralyzed by a
stroke in 1901 and died in 1906. But his career exerted a profound influence
on the progress of international drama, and along with his Russian contemporary
Anton Chekhov, he is largely responsible for the restoration of drama as a
vehicle for social change in fin-de-siècle Europe and America. Contemporary
playwrights and audiences still find in Ibsen much to admire. Arthur Miller,
for example, has adapted Enemy of the People, and Hedda Gabler was
produced in New York with great success in 2001.
Notes on Hedda Gabler
In her chapter "Worlds Apart:
Hedda Gabler on Stage in London and Paris," Kirsten Shepherd-Barr conducts
a careful study of the play in performance in the 1890s. Shepherd-Barr concludes
that the contents and themes of Hedda Gabler are more "radical" than
those of A Doll House and Ghosts, even thought the former ends
with a wife leaving her family ("the door slam heard round the world," as
one critic phrased it) and the latter features a young man dying from congenital
syphilis. What is so radical about the play and character? What is so "modern?"
One possible suggestion emerges in reviews of the 2001 production starring
Kate Burton—namely, that like Hamlet, Hedda provides audiences with a complex
pathology, a kind of scientific depiction of mental disorder. If so, this
is a far cry from the vacuous melodrama that dominated the Victorian stage
and the shallow characters such plays typically featured.
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Selected Bibliography of Ibsen's Work
 Catiline (1850, printed)
The Warrior's Barrow (1850, produced)
St. John's Eve (1853)
Lady Inger of Østraat (1854)
The Feast at Solhaug (1856)
Olaf Liljekrans (1857)
The Vikings at Helgeland (1858)
Love's Comedy (1862)
The Pretenders (1863)
Brand (1866)
Peer Gynt (1867)
The League of Youth (1869)
Emperor and Galilean (1873)
The Pillars of Society (1879)
A Doll House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1866)
The Lady from the Sea (1888)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1891)
Little Eyolf (1894)
John Gabriel Borkman (1896)
When We Dead Awaken (1899)
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Further Reading About Ibsen's Life
Ferguson, Robert. Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography. London: Richard Cohen, 1996.
Koht, Halvdan. Life of Ibsen. 2 vols. New York: W.W. Norton, 1931.
Meyer, Michael. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
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Further Reading About Ibsen's Work
Egan, Michael, ed. Henrik Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1972.
Fjelde, Rolf, ed. Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965.
Fuchs, Elinor. "Mythic Structure in Hedda Gabler: The Mask Behind the Face." Comparative Drama 19.3 (1985): 209-21.
Gates, Joanne E. "Elizabeth Robins and the 1891 Production of Hedda Gabler." Modern Drama 28.4 (1985): 611-19.
Goldman, Michael. Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.
Hurt, James. Catiline's Dream: An Essay on Ibsen's Plays. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1973.
Innes, Christopher L. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London: Routledge, 2000.
Knight, G. Wilson. Henrik Ibsen. New York: Grove, 1962.
Lucas, F.L. The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Lyons, Charles R. Hedda Gabler: Gender, Role, and World. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Norseng, Mary Kay. "Suicide and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: The Seen and the Unseen, Sight and Site, in the Theater of the Mind." Scandinavian Studies 71.1 (1999): 1-40.
Shaw, Bernard. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. 1891. 3rd printing. New York: Hill & Wang, 1957.
Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Ibsen and the Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Sprinchorn, Evert. "The Unspoken Text in Hedda Gabler." Modern Drama 36.3 (1993): 353-57.
Templeton, Joan. Ibsen's Women. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966.
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