1836
The devil take what nowadays passes for beautiful language! This language in drama is the counterpart of “How beautifully put!” in conversation. Chintz, chintz, and more chintz! It may glitter but it gives no heat.
1838
“Form is the expression of necessity,” I say in a critical piece.
Best definition: Content presents the task; form, the solution.
1839
Whether the idea masters the poet or the poet the idea—everything depends on this.
Every great man falls by his own sword. Only no one knows it.
Form is the highest content.
Bad playwrights with good heads give us their scheme instead of characters and their system instead of passions.
There are dramas without ideas in which people take a walk and meet with bad luck on the way.
Most writers of historical tragedy don’t give us historical characters but parodies of them.
1840
In Shakespeare we find, amid the great wealth, the most miserly economy. In general a sign of the highest genius.
All life is a battle of the individual with the universe.
1841
Dramatic deeds are not the ones that go straight ahead like bullets.
Drama shouldn’t present new stories but new relationships.
1844
In the drama, what we shall see as bad we must also be able to see as good.
The problematic is the life breath of poetry. . . .
1845
A genuine drama is comparable to one of those big buildings which have almost as many rooms and corridors below ground as above ground. People in general are aware only of the latter; the master builder of the former as well.
1847
To present the necessary in the form of the accidental: that is the whole secret of dramatic style.
Ballet: I see people in a ballet as deaf-mutes who’ve gone crazy.
All dramatic art has to do with impropriety and incomprehension, for what is more improper and uncomprehending than passion?
1850
Ultimately, play-acting is only living at speed, at unimaginable speed! Hence, when a critic writes about an actor, he is criticizing the life process of a human being.
1851
By shortening a play, you can lengthen it.
In drama no character should ever utter a thought; from the thought in a play come the speeches of all the characters.
1853
The worst plays often start out like the best ones. The battle that’s most ignominiously lost starts out with thunder and lightning just like the one that will be most gloriously won.
1854
Let the What in drama be known and throw no shadows; but not the How.
We know that a man must die; we don’t know what fever he will die of.
1857
The bad conscience of mankind invented tragedy.
The final destiny of a play is always: to be read. Why shouldn’t it begin the way it’s going to end anyhow?
Ideas are to drama what counterpoint is to music: nothing in themselves but the sine qua non for everything.
1861
Every genuine comic figure must resemble the hunchback who’s in love with himself.
Monologues: pure respirations of the soul.
1862
“Tragic,” literally translated: goatish, goatlike, a meaning which especially French writers of tragedy often still give to the word.
Opera is the most decisive break with banal illusion: and yet it works.
1865
The Schiller-Calderon-Racine kind of drama stands to the Shakespearean as vocal to instrumental music.
All material is dead; all life stems from form.
Ideas. You can’t have a play without ideas, any more than a living man without air. But does it follow that, because there’s earth, fire, air, and water in a man, he is nothing but a receptacle for these four elements?
In modern French plays, morality is the orange in the dead pig’s mouth.
That the religious origin of the drama is no accident.
Translated by Eric Bentley
1 Reprinted by courtesy of Eric Bentley. No playwright has said better things about the drama than Hebbel, yet very little of what he said on this subject has been done into English. As the present book does not have room for the major essays (“One Word about the Drama,” “My Word about the Drama,” Preface to Mary Magdalene, etc.), it has been thought appropriate to quote from the Journals, where, oddly enough, the dramatist expressed himself most pithily. (Translator’s note.) Copyright 1960 by Eric Bentley.