The series of twelve prose dramas for which Ibsen is generally known outside Norway were all written quite late in his life, from 1877 (Pillars of the Community) to 1899 (When We Dead Awaken). By 1877 he was forty-nine years old and already had over half of his literary production behind him; his first play, Catilina, was published in 1850, and he went on to publish a further fourteen plays as well as a volume of poetry over the following twenty-five years. It was during this period that he acquired the skills of writing for the stage which he was to use with such assurance in his mature works. By the time he published Brand and Peer Gynt, in 1866 and 1867 respectively, he had written and seen staged several of his own plays.
Henrik Ibsen had an inauspicious beginning as a writer; the son of a bankrupt father, he had left school at fifteen to start work as an apothecary’s apprentice. Largely self-taught, he failed his university entrance exams, but persevered in writing plays and managed to attract the attention of the new Norwegian Theatre in Bergen, which had been set up by the world-famous violinist and entrepreneur Ole Bull. Here Ibsen was appointed ‘dramatic author’ in 1851, a post he held for six years; this was followed by five years at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania (Oslo). During this time it was his responsibility to write plays for performance at the two theatres, as well as directing plays by other authors. In the tradition of the time, his plays were written largely in verse, and in line with the National Romantic ideals fostered by the growing movement for independence they often took their inspiration from earlier Norwegian history, such as Lady Inger of Ostrat (1855), about sixteenth-century Dano-Norwegian dynastic battles, and The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), which dramatized the tenth-century conflict between the warriors Sigurd and Gunnar and their ill-matched wives Dagny and Hjørdis. The plays he was directing were often foreign ones imported as light entertainment, largely French comedies by dramatists such as Eugène Scribe or Danish ones by Ludvig Holberg, from which he learned much about the techniques of stagecraft.
His tenure as contracted dramatic author and theatre director was not a happy one, however; his own plays had variable success, and he was not gifted as an entrepreneur or as an administrator. In Christiania things went from bad to worse, as the theatre’s finances became precarious. Ibsen was attacked in the press for his bad management and reacted with apathy; his productions failed to arouse any interest, and for a few years he found himself unable to write any more plays. To some extent he was also a scapegoat for the theatre board’s extravagance in incurring debts for a programme of rebuilding which far exceeded the theatre’s income. The final result was that the theatre went bankrupt in June 1862, and Ibsen was fired. For the next couple of years he had no regular income. He applied to the government for an annual stipend as an author and was refused, although the only other two applicants, his friend and dramatic rival Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and the poet Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, were awarded grants. Release from the theatrical grind did allow him to write his best two plays so far, Love’s Comedy (1862) and The Pretenders (1863). The former, a comedy of contemporary manners in verse, was due to be performed by the Christiania Theatre, but then withdrawn because of the theatre’s financial problems. The latter was a historical play, taking as its subject the fourteenth-century struggle for power between Earl Skule and King Haakon, often interpreted as a dramatization of the power struggle between the self-doubting Ibsen and the supremely confident Bjørnson. It was also Ibsen’s first attempt at writing a play in modern colloquial prose. He directed it himself at the Christiania Theatre in January 1864, and this time he had a critical and popular success. But by now Ibsen had already decided to leave Norway.
The mid nineteenth century was a turbulent time politically for the three mainland countries of Scandinavia, and links between Norway, Denmark and Sweden were much closer then than now. Norway had been ruled by Denmark until 1814 and was released from that dependence only to be constrained by European political negotiations to become the junior partner in a union with Sweden, which lasted until 1905. Ties to Denmark were still particularly close during Ibsen’s lifetime. Christiania was a small provincial town, and Copenhagen a cultural centre for writers and artists; many moved there, and most leading Norwegian authors came, during the second half of the century, to be published in Denmark. A movement for the promotion of closer political and cultural ties between the countries, called Scandinavianism, had attracted support from academics and politicians since the 1840s, and Ibsen was an ardent supporter. King Karl XV of Sweden-Norway and his ministers had made assurances of mutual self-defence and military aid. Thus when Denmark was threatened by Prussian invasion from the south in 1863–4, Ibsen was in no doubt that Norwegians at least would take up arms for their ‘brother in need’, as he declared in his poem of that name.1 The fact that it did not happen was a bitter blow and strengthened his determination to turn his back on what he saw as his pusillanimous native land.
Money, however, was still a problem, as it had been for many years, and Ibsen now had a wife and small son to support. He managed to obtain a travel grant of 400 speciedaler from the government for a study trip to Rome and Paris, two-thirds of what he had asked for, which was then supplemented by a further 700 speciedaler raised by the ever-generous Bjørnson. The latter demonstrated an unfailing readiness to support his less successful colleague both in word and in deed.
At the beginning of April 1864 Ibsen left Christiania for a sojourn abroad which would last for twenty-seven years before he finally returned home to settle in Norway. While he was in Copenhagen on the way south the news came of the final defeat of the Danes by the Prussians at Dybbøl and the surrender of two-fifths of Danish territory. When he reached Berlin in May he saw the Danish cannon paraded in triumph through the streets, a sight which sharpened his dismay at what he saw as his country’s failure. Finally, on 9 May he crossed the Alps into Italy, reaching Rome in the middle of June. Emerging from the tunnel into the sunlight of the south was a revelation which he recalled vividly several decades later:
Over the high mountains the clouds hung like great dark curtains, and beneath these we drove through the tunnel and suddenly found ourselves at Mira Mara, where the beauty of the South, a marvellously brilliant light shining like white marble, suddenly opened before me and coloured all my later work, even if not all of it was beautiful.2
It may seem at first sight as if the creative floodgates opened when Ibsen reached Rome; after his arrival in June 1864, his two ground-breaking poetic dramas were soon published, Brand in 1866 and Peer Gynt in 1867. Inspiration did not flow as easily as that, however. Despite his enthusiasm for the newly unified Italy and the sense of creative and personal liberation he experienced on leaving Norway, he struggled to find both a form in which to express his frustration at recent events and a peaceful environment in which to work. It was not until he moved to the countryside in the summer of 1864 that he started to write – and then he began work, not on a drama, but on a long narrative poem, usually referred to as the ‘Epic Brand’.3
This poem, which exists in differing variants, contains much of the same material as the first two acts of the later play: the meeting between Einar, a fair-haired boy from a productive farm and a happy family, and the darker Brand, who grew up in poverty and strife in a narrow valley to the north; the triangle Einar–Brand–Agnes, in which Agnes feels compelled to abandon the joyful celebration of life with Einar in order to follow the harsh demands of Brand’s calling; the contrast between the little church in the valley and the Ice Church in the mountains, to which Brand is enticed by a deranged gypsy girl. It begins with the poem ‘To My Fellows in Guilt’, which addresses more directly than the later play the ignominious failure of Norway’s delusions of greatness and the poet’s shame at having fostered the illusion. It is written in iambic pentameters, in eight-line stanzas with regular rhymes – a more rigid form than the freer metre he later adopted.
It soon became apparent to Ibsen that the form he had chosen for his ideas was not working. He struggled with it for a year in increasing frustration, from the summer of 1864 to the summer of 1865, before he finally abandoned it. As he later described it in a letter to Bjørnson, the new shape of the work came to him in a moment of inspiration: ‘Then one day I went into St Peter’s Basilica – I was in Rome on some business – and there all at once it came to me, a strong and clear form for what I wanted to say.’4 Then the floodgates really did open, and Ibsen completed his new play in only four months, finishing it in mid-November. And, after having failed to attract any commercial interest with most of his earlier plays, with this play at last he found a supportive and influential publisher: Frederik V. Hegel, head of the Copenhagen-based firm of Gyldendal, publisher of many of Scandinavia’s leading writers. Hegel took the play on the recommendation of the indefatigable Bjørnson, and, after some delay caused by missing letters and misunderstandings, Brand was published in March 1866.
The play was an immediate bestseller, appearing in four editions in the first year and accruing royalties which provided Ibsen with financial security for the first time in his life. It was also a critical success across Scandinavia, enthused over by literary arbiters and by other writers – although there were some reservations about its transgression of accepted aesthetic norms. It was not staged, and it was not intended to be staged; it is subtitled ‘A dramatic poem’ and was read as a work of poetry. The mutually beneficial working relationship with Gyldendal was to continue for the rest of Ibsen’s life.
‘After Brand, Peer Gynt followed as it were of its own accord,’ declared Ibsen in a letter from 1870.5 This is a truth with modifications. For some time after finishing the earlier play, Ibsen was not sure what he was going to write next. The delay in the publication of Brand made it difficult to settle to a new work, and he considered various different projects, including a historical drama about Emperor Julian, to which he was to return years later and which would eventually become the ambitious double drama Emperor and Galilean (1873). Finally, in January 1867 Ibsen could inform Hegel that he had started work on another long dramatic poem ‘whose protagonist will be one of the Norwegian peasantry’s half mythical folk-tale characters from more recent times’.6 He had hoped to have it ready by the summer, though in the event it took him nine months to write; the last two acts had ballooned out of all proportion to the first three. He sent it to Hegel piecemeal as the various sections were ready, finishing with Act Five in October 1867, so that the book could be published – as were all his later plays – in time for the Christmas market.
This new drama was eagerly awaited after the sensation of Brand and was snapped up in the bookshops; two editions were printed in the first month. Critical acclaim was led by Bjørnson, who welcomed the play as a hard-hitting and uproariously funny satire of Norwegian self-righteousness – although he also found it a little self-indulgent. Others had difficulties with the unconventional form of the drama, particularly the influential Danish critic Clemens Petersen, who found that neither Brand nor Peer Gynt could be called ‘properly poetry’.7 (Peer Gynt, like Brand, was subtitled ‘a dramatic poem’.) Ibsen, never one to take criticism lying down, retorted forthwith to Bjørnson that Peer Gynt was poetry – ‘or if it is not, then it will become so. The concept of poetry in our country, in Norway, will come to adapt itself to my work.’8
Ibsen and his family stayed in Italy for four years, and Brand and Peer Gynt in different ways bear traces of that time. Living outside Norway meant that Ibsen could look back at Norway, as he was to do in many of his later plays, with a clearer sense of its challenges and its limitations, and of how his own views had been coloured by his early environment. In May 1868 he and his family left Italy, finally settling in Dresden in October, where they were to remain for the next six and a half years.
This ‘cathedral of a play’, ‘the most powerful drama of ideas in the whole of Scandinavian literature’, is dominated by the towering central figure, who is present in nearly every scene.9 Both charismatic and forbidding, Brand demands absolute and unwavering commitment in those around him as he does in himself and finds it as difficult as anyone else to carry his ideal unscathed through the vicissitudes of life.
It is not hard to find the germ of the character and the ideas in the play in recent international events. One oft-cited model for Brand is the young Norwegian theologian Christopher Bruun, who had taken seriously the ideals of Nordic brotherhood and was one of very few Norwegian and Swedish volunteers who fought beside the Danes at Dybbøl. He spent the winter of 1864–5 in Rome and had frequent conversations with Ibsen. Brand’s scorn for fine but empty promises is Bruun’s own, and several of the representatives of authority in the play – the mayor, the schoolmaster, the sexton – are targets for the author’s indignation at hollow political rhetoric and hypocritical self-interest. The harshness of Brand’s indictments might also owe something to some stirrings of bad conscience on Ibsen’s part; after all, he had not volunteered to fight alongside his brothers either. The title of the poem ‘To My Fellows in Guilt’ (‘Til mine medskyldige’) means literally ‘to those guilty with me’.
Religion is central to the play, with its many discussions of what it means to be a Christian. The Dano-Norwegian church was riven by dissent in the mid nineteenth century, with opposing factions asserting different interpretations of God’s word. On the one hand was a more optimistic, sunnier kind of belief, stressing the positive sides of living a good life, having faith in God and judging mildly, often referred to as Grundtvigianism after the Danish theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig. This is the school of thought represented by Einar early in the play, by Agnes throughout and to some extent by the Dean. On the other hand were the pietistic movements which sprang up around the country from early in the century, demanding remorse and repentance in an unending battle against man’s sinful nature, seen here in Einar’s later incarnation and in some of Brand’s more extreme pronouncements. One such pietist, Gustav Adolph Lammers, was the vicar of Ibsen’s home town of Skien, and Ibsen acknowledged him as a source of inspiration for the play. And then, of course, there was the prominent Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Ibsen maintained that he had read little of Kierkegaard and understood even less, but his ideas were current in intellectual debate in the mid nineteenth century. Brand explores the conflict between what Kierkegaard refers to as the aesthetic and the ethical modes of living, as represented by the opposing philosophies of Einar, the man whose life is dedicated to the pleasures of sensory experience, and Brand, with his focus on living in a principled way, not for his own profit but for the good of society. The play also mirrors Kierkegaard’s criticism of the established church and his insistence on the necessity of absolute commitment to an ideal. 10
Brand strongly reflects the events of Ibsen’s own life – not only his political indignation but his personal odyssey. He may have been writing in the light of the Italian south, but his thoughts were still in Norway, drawn back mentally as Brand is physically to the ice and snow, the deep sunless valleys and what he represented as the petty provincial obstructionism. Norway rarely gets a good press in Ibsen’s writings after 1864; he rejected it as he felt it had rejected him. The obsession with heredity, with the inheritance of sin, which weighs so heavily on Brand – the burden of his mother’s greed, his parents’ hateful marriage and the unintended consequence of the birth of the deranged Gerd – runs like a red thread through many of his later plays, such as Ghosts and Rosmersholm. Money, the acquiring of it and the losing of it, was an insistent personal issue and is the catalyst for intergenerational conflict here as it is, for example, in The Wild Duck and John Gabriel Borkman.
In the end, however, it is not the topicality of the play or its reflection of its author’s mental state which makes it appeal to audiences and directors today; it is the fascination of the central character’s battle with his surroundings and his own demons. What starts out as a crusade against the folly of others – the fecklessness of Einar and Agnes, the dullness of the peasant community, the madness of Gerd – slowly becomes a shutting out, literally, of any light in the darkness of despair. The demands of absolute commitment to his ideal drive Brand into a corner where he must collude in the destruction of all that is dear to him; whenever he wavers, some portent or warning materializes to cut off his retreat. Even the doctor, the voice of reason here as in so many of Ibsen’s plays, goads him into inflexibility by commenting that Brand’s harsh repudiation of his mother’s pleas melts into compromise when his son is ill (‘One law for the world, / another for your child’). Brand denies himself and those around him any chance to say ‘I have done enough’ and climbs further and further into an icy barren region where his only companion at the last is his soul-sister Gerd, his own reflection in a broken mirror. His dream of a new society has grown into a nightmare which cuts him off from all society; in his striving to create a utopia he has become a dictator. As Helge Rønning says in his study of the play, at the end he has become his own victim, and Brand is thus a tragedy – the only one, he maintains, that Ibsen wrote.11
It is perhaps more difficult in these secular times for an audience to sympathize with a character who feels called upon by God to deny his own humanity. Yet the play is nevertheless compelling in its study of devotion to a calling taken to its ultimate conclusion, a conclusion as devastating for the individual as for his surroundings. ‘Brand is myself in my best moments,’ Ibsen declared a few years later.12 Like many other of Ibsen’s pronouncements, this one might well be treated with a little scepticism, but it is a corrective to a complete condemnation of the character. So too is the ending of the play. Brand’s ultimate anguished questions – have I done enough to be saved? Does all my striving count for nothing? – are answered by the cryptic pronouncement ‘He is the God of Love’ (‘Han er deus caritatis!’ in the original). This might be understood as a rebuke to Brand – you have misunderstood all your life, the harsh God you have served is your own creation – or as a statement of reconciliation: he is a loving and accepting God, you too will be forgiven and welcomed. Or perhaps, probably, both.
The verse in which the play is composed is as accomplished as it is difficult to reproduce in translation.13 Nearly all of it is written in four-foot lines which sweep the action along, sometimes in iambic and sometimes in trochaic metre, with frequent but not always regular rhymes. It is a flexible verse form which can convey both the rapid interchange of colloquial dialogue and the more reflective musings of Brand’s monologues. The action often proceeds by a series of repetitions, parallels and oxymorons which bring the opposing values in the play into stark contrast and are also a feature of Geoffrey Hill’s poetic rewording (‘A middling this, a middling that, / never humble, never great. / Above the worst, beneath the best, / each virtue vicious to the rest.’) The exception to this verse form is Einar and Agnes’ bridal song in Act One, where the steady rhythm of Brand’s observations is broken by a leap into a traditional ballad form, a springing, dancing celebration – and the only section of the ‘Epic Brand’ to survive practically unchanged into the final drama. Hill’s version of Brand does not attempt a direct translation of the original, but it does follow closely the shifts in mood and tempo of the different scenes and captures the muscular beat of the central character’s relentless compulsion.
Peer Gynt stands for everything Brand despises. Or rather, one might say, he doesn’t stand for anything. He runs, he hides, he evades pursuit and definition. If Brand is placed at one extreme in his refusal to compromise, Peer must be seen at the other; rather than confront any challenge or face down any obstacle, he goes round and about, takes a detour, as he does with the Boyg. He refuses to make a choice and stick to it; whenever any commitment is demanded, he backs off. Playing with the trolls, even marrying one and adopting their lifestyle, is fine; but when asked to agree to an action which would cut him off irrevocably from the human world, he baulks at it. He needs to be assured, as he tells his business associates in Act Four, that ‘one who’s crossed a bridge can take / at any time the same bridge back’. That is why he realizes in the Cairo madhouse: ‘I am a sheet of paper on which nothing is written’; and why, when he peels the onion of the Gyntian self, he finds no core. He spends his life asserting himself bombastically but does not know who he is. And that is also why, as the Button Moulder explains, he must be melted down; he is a failed project whose components can be reused for something better.
Yet although the conclusion may be a depressing one, both the protagonist and the author have a lot of fun on the way. Peer is a liar, that is established in the first line of the play; but by the same token he is also a poet (a duality which is evident in several of Ibsen’s later flawed heroes). Peer’s refusal to face unpleasant facts diverts him into realms of fantasy in which he creates and peoples whole worlds; he leads his listeners off on riotous adventures and sees in nearly every situation a chance to invent new kingdoms and new dreams. Indeed, the play as a whole, or the latter part of it, might be seen as a dream, as Peer’s dream about himself, in which the other characters represent aspects of himself or embody alternative directions he might follow.14
The whole play is also a poem, and Ibsen’s most impressive poetic achievement. Unlike Brand it uses a wide variety of different verse forms: iambic and trochaic tetrameters, iambic pentameters, three-beat ballad verse and four-beat knittel verse, and short two-beat lines. It often gallops along at a furious pace, as if trying to keep up with Peer’s imagination. ‘It is wild and formless,’ Ibsen later declared in a letter to the English critic Edmund Gosse, ‘recklessly written in a way that I could only dare to write while far from home.’15 A new mood or a new speaker is generally the cue for a change in rhythm and pace. Knittel was a popular medieval verse form, close to Norwegian everyday speech, with four-beat lines and a varying number of unstressed syllables, often used as the devil’s verse form (e.g. by Goethe in Faust). It is the most frequently used form in the play, spoken for much of the time by Peer as well as by characters like the Dovre King, the trolls and the Thin Man; with its abundance of syllables it is jaunty and witty. The ballad verse, on the other hand, is a lyrical, more reflective form, used for example by the dying Aase waiting for Peer to return home. Only one scene in the play is written in iambic pentameters, and that is the priest’s funeral oration in Act Five about the man who chopped off his finger as a boy to avoid conscription. It underlines the solemnity of the occasion and the importance of the speech about someone who remained true to himself. (This story originated in the ‘Epic Brand’; the fact that Ibsen saved it from there and transferred it, much expanded, to this later play, indicates its significance to him.)
As he did with Brand, Ibsen drew on a variety of sources for this play. There was a renewed interest in folk belief and the oral tradition in mid-nineteenth-century Norway as part of the National Romantic movement, and folk tales and legends were collected and published by scholars such as P. Chr. Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. One of Asbjørnsen’s tales tells of Per Gynt from Gudbrandsdal, a hunter who shot bears and encountered the Boyg of Etnedal, and the story of the ride on the buck’s back is taken from another of his tales about a local character, Gudbrand Glesne.16 Ibsen himself had been on a walking tour of Gudbrandsdal in 1862 to collect folk legends and sayings. Stories of trolls are legion in Norwegian folklore; they are threatening but usually not very bright, and easy to outwit. The perky young adventurer from folk tales Askeladden (the Ash Lad), who starts with nothing and ends up marrying the princess and inheriting half the kingdom, is another obvious model for Peer. Topical references abound; Norwegian self-satisfaction is pilloried, though with more good humour than in the previous play – and the idiosyncrasies of other nationalities are also satirized. National Romanticism itself is not spared, as when the much reduced Dovre King reappears at the end to complain that he is told he only exists in books, and the best way he can survive is to audition for a role in a national drama.
Other literary antecedents can also be traced in the play. It can be seen as a kind of morality play, a story of Everyman in a search for salvation, and has elements of the picaresque and the travel narrative, borrowing especially from Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Subterranean Journey (1741), a satirical utopia peopled by fantastic monsters in the vein of Gulliver’s Travels. There are many – frequently misquoted – biblical allusions, and clear parallels with and references to Goethe’s Faust, as well as to the writings of Ibsen’s friend Paul Botten-Hansen, whose play The Hulder Wedding contains a madhouse scene, a troll-king under the mountain and a fast-talking devil similar to the Thin Man. And there are clear autobiographical elements in the story of the rich but improvident father who reduces his family to penury, and the wandering son who continually questions his own motives and his own vocation.
As with Brand, the ending of this play raises more questions than it answers. Twice the Button Moulder returns to judge Peer’s objections to obliteration inadequate; he has failed to be good enough or evil enough to have realized his potential as an individual, he has just been mediocre. The play ends before the Button Moulder returns for the third time. Will Solveig’s intercession be Peer’s salvation? It seems unlikely, as his aversion to commitment has been as stark in this relationship as in any. In her final song he returns full-circle to the beginning of his life, to be the child at his mother’s knee. His journey of education has taken him nowhere and taught him nothing. Or is Solveig just Peer’s wish-image of a woman? Is he dreaming still?
Peer Gynt was the first of these two dramatic poems to be transferred to the stage. In January 1874 Ibsen wrote to the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and asked him to consider composing a musical score for the play; he also suggested the kind of music which might accompany various scenes and proposed sweeping changes to the text, which involved among other things leaving out almost the whole of Act Four. Grieg accepted the commission, although it was to take him far longer and be much more demanding than he had anticipated. (‘I’ve written something for the Dovre King’s Hall,’ he complained to a friend, ‘which I literally cannot bear to listen to, it simply resounds with cowpats, Norwegianness and tothyselfsufficientness!’)17 Finally, in September 1875 he had finished the score, and the world première opened on 24 February 1876 at the Christiania Theatre, directed by the Swede Ludvig Josephson. Expectations had been high, and the reception was enthusiastic, despite the length of the performance (five hours for the première). The play was performed twenty-five times in the first season, an unusually high number and a lucrative business for the author.
The first translation of the play was into German, by Ludwig Passarge, who published it in 1881 despite Ibsen’s warning about the folly of choosing this particular play: ‘I have grave doubts in this respect. Of all my books I regard Peer Gynt as the one least constituted to be understood outside the Scandinavian countries.’18 The first translation into English was by Charles and William Archer in 1892, but the play had to wait until 1922 for its first substantial London production at the Old Vic.
Once Peer Gynt had been put on stage, it began to seem less impossible to do the same with Brand. Act Four had been singled out as a ‘performance piece’ and staged several times in the late 1860s, partly due to the desire of the leading actress Laura Gundersen to play Agnes. Ibsen discussed a possible production with Ludvig Josephson in the 1870s, when Peer Gynt was staged, but plans were shelved for some time until Josephson finally produced the play (in Swedish translation) at his own New Theatre in Stockholm, on 24 March 1885. Again, once it had reached the stage it was a great success, with sixteen performances in the first season, despite the fact that a performance lasted nearly seven hours. The Norwegian première came ten years later, in 1895, the same year as Aurélien Lugné-Poë staged the play in Paris.
Germany, the first country of export for much of Scandinavian literature, also saw the first translations of Brand, with four independent versions published in the first six years. Three translations into English were published in the early 1890s, and the first English performance was in 1912, at the Court Theatre in London. As theatrical conventions changed, the staging of troll halls, shipwrecks, snowstorms and avalanches came to seem a less daunting prospect, and the plays became established as a part of international theatrical repertoire.
Notwithstanding Ibsen’s remarks about the fact that Peer Gynt was the least likely of his plays to be understood outside Scandinavia, it has proved to be one of the most enduring in its appeal to different national audiences. George Bernard Shaw, not otherwise remembered as an advocate of Ibsen’s poetic works, declared Peer Gynt to be ‘a hero for everybody’ alongside the likes of Hamlet and Faust.19 And Frederick J. and Lise-Lone Marker, in their analysis of the often wildly experimental twentieth-century productions of the play, conclude: ‘Far more open and associational in its structure and hence less confined to a specific theatrical mode, [Peer Gynt] has … seemed to grow more modern, rather than less so.’20
Peer Gynt was to be the last of Ibsen’s poetic dramas. After these two expansive and idiosyncratic creations, the rest of his plays were written in a prose which more and more closely approached the rhythms of contemporary colloquial speech. And with the major exception of Emperor and Galilean – a work as ambitious in its scope, if not as impressive in its achievement, as the two dramatic poems – they remained largely within the domestic sphere. Ibsen’s investigations into the clash between aspirations and human fallibility were to move to a more intimate canvas.
Janet Garton, 2016
1. ‘En broder i nød!’ (1863), published in Digte (1871). Henrik Ibsens Skrifter [HIS], vol. 11, pp. 514–16. HIS is available at http://www.ibsen.uio.no/forside.xhtml.
2. From a speech at a gala dinner in Copenhagen, 1 April 1898. HIS, vol. 16, p. 513.
3. James McFarlane’s prose translation of the ‘Epic Brand’ is printed in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, ed. J. W. McFarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 37–71. The work was considered lost for much of Ibsen’s lifetime and not published until after his death.
4. Letter to Bjørnson, 12 September 1865. HIS, vol.12, p. 181.
5. Letter to Peter Hansen, 28 October 1870. HIS, vol. 12, p. 428.
6. Letter to Frederik Hegel, 5 January 1867. HIS, vol. 12, p. 260.
7. Bjørnson’s review was printed in Norsk Folkeblad, 23 November 1867, Petersen’s in Fædrelandet, 13 November 1867. Translated excerpts from reviews of the play are printed in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, pp. 494–6.
8. Letter to Bjørnson, 9 December 1867. HIS, vol. 12, p. 283.
9. See Michael Meyer, Henrik Ibsen (London: Cardinal, 1971), p. 259, and John Northam: ‘Dramatic and Non-dramatic Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed. J. W. McFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 28.
10. For a fuller exploration of echoes of Kierkegaard in both Brand and Peer Gynt, see David Thomas, Henrik Ibsen (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 41–3.
11. Helge Rønning, Den umulige friheten. Henrik Ibsen og moderniteten (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2006), pp. 161–3.
12. Letter to Peter Hansen, 28 October 1870. HIS, vol. 12, p. 428.
13. See Åse Hjorth Lervik’s study of the poetry of the play, Ibsens verskunst i Brand (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969), and John Northam’s elucidation of the varieties of rhythm and rhyme in ‘Dramatic and Non-dramatic Poetry’.
14. This interpretation is suggested by Helge Rønning, Den umulige friheten. Henrik Ibsen og moderniteten, pp. 163–6.
15. Letter to Edmund Gosse, 30 April 1872, HIS, vol. 13, p. 69.
16. See P. Chr. Asbjørnsen, Norske Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn (Christiania: P. T. Steensballe, 1870). Digitized text available at: https://archive.org/details/norskehuldreeve01asbjgoog.
17. Letter to Frants Beyer, 27 August 1874. Quoted in HIS, vol. 5, p. 587.
18. Letter to Ludwig Passarge, 19 May 1880. Quoted in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, p. 492.
19. See Tore Rem: ‘ “The Provincial of Provincials”: Ibsen’s Strangeness and the Process of Canonisation’, Ibsen Studies 4, no. 2 (2004), pp. 205–26.
20. Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, Ibsen’s Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 43.