Ibsen, Henrik

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IBSEN, HENRIK

early-nineteenth-century theater
reception
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IBSEN, HENRIK (1828–1906), Norwegian playwright.

Henrik Ibsen's ascendancy to the front rank of European writers in the second half of the nineteenth century was achieved against stupendous odds. He was born in 1828, in Skien, a small town in southern Norway. William Archer (1856–1924), his first major English translator, wrote: "his Dano-Norwegian language is spoken by some four and a half million people in all, and the number of foreigners who learn it is infinitesimal. The sheer force of his genius has broken this barrier of language" (Postlewait, p. 55). At the age of fifteen Ibsen left home for the coastal town of Grimstad as an apprentice to an apothecary and in 1850 left Grimstad for Christiania (now Oslo), having written verses in support of the European revolutionary events of 1848. In this year (1850) he published his first play, the tragedy Catiline.

Christiania (a raw, newly emerging "city" of about thirty thousand) was the capital of a country with no dramatic tradition. Its theater presented plays performed by Danish companies and imported from the current European repertoire that included no examples of major drama. Ibsen's early dramatic criticism in Christiania deplored the dismal state of the theater and of public taste. His first play to be staged, successfully by the Christiania theater in 1850, was the one-act The Warrior's Barrow, dramatizing a highly Romantic dialectic of pagan versus Christian, north versus south, and male versus female—polarities that continued, with much greater artistry, throughout his subsequent writing.

He abandoned a second career as a painter; but his plays display a heightened sense of the visual aspects of drama: the stage space a canvas for a thoroughly "composed" and powerful iconography. This became apparent after he abandoned the verse medium of Peer Gynt (1867). In his later realist cycle, the twelve plays from Pillars of Society (1877) to When We Dead Awaken (1899), the meticulously detailed stage set serves simultaneously as a vehicle of symbolic meaning and a determining element of the action, extending the overall metaphor of the play. The dynamic interplay between the stage space and the characters who occupy it generates much of the dramatic tension of Ibsen's realist dramaturgy.

In 1851 Ole Borneman Bull (1810–1880), a noted Norwegian violinist and theatrical manager, engaged Ibsen as "playwright in residence" for the newly created Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. Much of his responsibility consisted of staging what he termed "Scribe and Co.'s sugar-candy dramas"—well-made plays by the popular French dramatist Augustin-Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) and his followers. This involvement early in his career in the actual staging of plays, gave Ibsen a firm grounding in the technical aspects of the theater.

early-nineteenth-century theater

The standing of the theater in Europe and the United States in the 1850s was at its lowest. In Britain, the last new play of any significance to

appear before the arrival of A Doll's House in London in 1889 had been Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777). During a century that saw the full flowering of the Romantic movement in poetry and the arts and the rise of the realistic novel as a major literary genre, with the exception of the German dramatists from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) to Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863), no drama of major significance appeared. No other period has been at once so fertile in literature and so barren in dramatic art.

The European stage, for most of the nineteenth century, was dominated by morally stereo-typical melodramas whose audiences were dazzled by spectacular stage effects and the violent exercise of conventional emotions; or, for more refined tastes, technically adroit "well-made-plays" after the Scribean model, whose main themes were adultery and murder in the fashionable classes; or, a variant of these, "thesis plays," taking up some problem of topical social morality for a mildly controversial airing. Ibsen's plays, however, reflect stronger influences from such German dramatists as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863), and their Danish followers.

This was the cultural situation in the theater that Ibsen was so momentously to engage. Nineteenth-century society concealed a host of skeletons in the closets of its private and public life and maintained highly developed antennae for detecting any hint either of political subversion or, especially in Britain and the United States, "impropriety" in social mores. Ibsen's volatile confrontation with the theater of his time is one of the ironies of cultural history. His identity as a dramatist seemed programmed to repudiate, at every point, the medium he was intellectually to dominate. Although continually rejected and assailed by the public, reduced to poverty, in exile, he doggedly worked on the debased condition of the theater until he forged a modern drama for his own revolutionary artistic purpose. After his first major success, Brand (1866), at the age of thirty-eight he kept up his contentious stance toward the public, remaining a center of controversy until long after his death in 1906.

Like the composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), Ibsen was determined that the medium he chose should be remade to conform to his artistic demands, setting the integrity of his art above all temptation to exploit a potentially very lucrative medium. Michael Meyer, in his biography of Ibsen, estimates that even at the height of his fame, in the more than a decade following A Doll's House, in which he created Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), and Hedda Gabler (1890), Ibsen earned less from this total output than a fashionable playwright would make in a single year.

reception

It is not surprising that his plays were initially greeted with intense hostility by practitioners and defenders of the traditional drama. More surprising was the intensity, scale, and duration of that hostility across Europe and the United States. However, a minority public was evolving, hungry for a theater into which one could take one's intellect. This, in part, accounts for the success of Ibsen with the "thinking world" when, in the late 1880s, his plays began to appear on the European stage. Ibsen offered a drama that was in tune with the leading ideas and artistic achievements of the time. This minority was a highly critical, often rebellious intelligentsia variously at odds with the aesthetic, moral, political, and religious premises of conventional society. Ibsen's dramas addressed all levels of cultural alienation. Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Augustus Moore, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce were among the many who, with the progressive men and women of Europe, and later the United States, took up the cause of Ibsen and the new independent theater movement. This minority theater, the cradle of serious modern drama, came into being in Berlin (the Freie Bühne, 1889) and London (the Independent Theatre 1891) specifically to perform Ibsen's Ghosts. In Paris, André Antoine's recently created Théâtre Libre performed Ghosts in 1890. George Moore, sitting in the audience, was so moved by the play he became a founding member of a new Irish Literary Theatre—later to become Ireland's Abbey Theatre.

Drama now followed the other arts by splitting into mutually incompatible—and often hostile—mainstream and minority camps. Performing an Ibsen play was considered virtually an insurrectionary act (Ghosts was banned from public performance in England for twenty-three years), and Ibsen became the most vilified, championed, talked and written about individual in Europe. "It may be questioned," wrote James Joyce in his review of When We Dead Awaken, "whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times." Within an astonishingly short time the theater, through Ibsen, had shaken off its insignificance and disrepute to became a major, and highly controversial, force in modern culture. His influence on modern drama is so great as to be almost incalculable.

George Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891, 1913) helped inaugurate an idea of Ibsen that stubbornly survives into the present as a writer of "problem plays" concerned with eradicating the social and ethical crises of middle-class culture. As early as 1907, Jennette Lee protested against this didactic interpretation. "The conception of a problem play as one in which some problem of modern life is discussed by the characters and worked out in the plot is foreign to Ibsen, as to all great artists" (Lee, p. 9).

An alternative tradition claims him as a consummate artist whose cycle of twelve plays in particular is one of the supreme achievements of modern literature. Ibsen interpretation and criticism continues to be as diverse and voluminous as that of any major writer.