‘The sound of the street door being slammed is heard from below.’
That famous stage direction, the last words on the last page of a play which in English tends to bear the title of A Doll’s House, was first read, albeit in Henrik Ibsen’s original Dano-Norwegian, in December 1879. Since then it has reverberated throughout the world, from Copenhagen to Canberra, from New York to New Delhi, from Bejing to Bristol.
A Doll’s House, in which Nora leaves not only her husband but also her young children, has led to controversial and celebrated productions and received iconic status both as a play and as a central document of female emancipation. It has even been hailed as ‘one of the great pages of bourgeois culture: on a par with Kant’s word on the Enlightenment, or Mill’s on liberty’.1 And it has, without exaggeration, contributed to change in numerous people’s lives and, however directly or indirectly, in societies at large. Ibsen’s art somehow continues to affect us, to produce spellbinding and transformative effects, around the world, well over a hundred years since it was first produced.
How did such dramatic innovation occur, and that from Henrik Ibsen, a nineteenth-century Norwegian, someone shaped by a culture and writing for a readership and audience at a great remove from the cultural centres of the world? How did Ibsen end up as ‘the Father of Modern Drama’?
‘Never before has a poet of world-wide fame appealed to his world-wide audience so exclusively in translations.’2 The theatre critic and translator William Archer’s observation, made in 1901, may serve as a reminder of how most readers and spectators encounter Ibsen, whether on page or stage. Coming from a small language culture, Ibsen was to depend on translation from the early point at which his plays began to travel, and he has remained so till this day; his status as world author or world dramatist was from the very beginning aided by the work of others: by translators, critics, publishers, scholars, actors, directors, as well as, inevitably, by new readers and audiences.
Ibsen’s plays may thus be seen as poignant examples of one of the most frequently quoted definitions of world literature as ‘writing that gains in translation’.3 Gaining in this respect does not of course mean in every respect or in every instance, and the new meanings created in and through translation are not necessarily better than the first or earlier ones. But since having had his first play translated in 1857, Ibsen has been the recipient of innumerable readings and stagings abroad, often in the form of strong appropriations and radical reuses of the originals, and these have certainly accomplished more than, and different things from, what has been achieved within his native culture. His plays have gained, more generally, simply by reaching audiences to whom he would not otherwise have been available. Translation has been an inescapable part of Ibsen’s survival as a classic and has given him his current status of a global phenomenon.
Ibsen, it ought to be added on a general note, reinvented his nation’s language; Norwegian (as well as Danish) was not the same after him. And it is impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult, to convey the freshness – including the neologisms and new coinages – the strangeness and poetic qualities of his works. Contrary to widely shared notions of a prosaic realist, Ibsen’s plays represent no transparent window to reality or the world; his prose is subtle, complex and self-conscious and has habitually been exposed to a smoothing-out and flattening in English.4 If we want to confront Ibsen and the ‘Ibsenesque’ in as much of its richness and complexity as possible, linguistic, aesthetic, historical and cultural, we need at the very least to be conscious of the fact that we are encountering him and it in translation. Starting in a small language, Ibsen is a dependant, always strikingly at the mercy of mediation.
And something is always lost in translation.5 Take, as a way into this volume of Ibsen’s first four so-called modern prose dramas, the titles of the plays. The first one, Samfundets støtter, has most often been translated as The Pillars of Society. But the key word ‘samfund’ in Dano-Norwegian (Ibsen’s written language was Danish, but he availed himself of many Norwegian words, expressions and constructions) contains the meanings of both ‘society’ and ‘community’, with the latter here being more prominent than the former. This is not least so in the play’s title, and this edition calls it Pillars of the Community. The expression ‘et dukkehjem’ was a neologism in Dano-Norwegian in Ibsen’s time, only, as far as we know, used once before in writing, and it literally means ‘a doll home’ (the closer equivalent of ‘a doll house’, ‘et dukkehus’, was available to Ibsen, and he did not use the genitive form, ‘en dukkes hus’; this is not just the doll Nora’s house, but a home for dolls). But Ibsen’s most famous play is so strongly established as A Doll’s House in English that we have chosen to retain it here.6 The next play, Ghosts, was called Gengangere by Ibsen, and is both more evocative and poetic in the original, literally meaning ‘something that or someone who walks again’, primarily with reference to a belief in people who return from the dead. It is closer to the French translation Les Revenants than to the English Ghosts. And, finally, the title of the last of the plays in this volume, An Enemy of the People, En folkefiende, had a much more novel feel to it when Ibsen first used it in Scandinavia in 1882 than it has today or even than it had when first translated into English. The compound ‘folkefiende’ had only rarely been used in Danish and Swedish, and then with the more restricted meaning of ‘an enemy of democracy’.
How, then, was Ibsen possible? And why should he be of concern to anyone outside his own country, one which had hardly yet produced a literature of its own when he began writing and publishing in the 1850s? There are, of course, no single or simple answers to such questions. But we may get somewhere by considering where he came from and the contexts in which his art was first created.
When the plays in this volume began to travel through the world from the 1880s onwards, they inevitably triggered questions of relevance. Why should theatre audiences and readers in London, Paris or Berlin feel that these new plays from the continent’s periphery applied to them? Why should Americans, Australians and Indians think that this was about them? Many wondered and expressed their puzzlement. A great number of foreign critics began by simply rejecting him as irrelevant, as what they called ‘provincial’, of no use to the centre and their own understanding of the world.
For quite some time, then, Ibsen was seen as a conspicuously backward writer. ‘If Ibsen were an Englishman … I should say that he was provincial; I should say that he was suburban,’ the conservative British critic Frederic Wedmore typically noted.7 The same critic wondered how such a playwright could claim ‘to be a “path-breaker” for our world of Western civilisation if the world he represents lies under conditions from which this Western world has long ago been delivered’.8 The cosmopolitan American Henry James – who after some initial scepticism became an Ibsen devotee – asked how this ‘provincial of provincials’ could have produced such captivating art, originating as it did ‘too far from Piccadilly and our glorious standards’.9 To James it was a ‘miracle’ every time Ibsen produced yet another play of such fascinating quality and attraction. He was struck by the advanced, ‘civilized’ and ‘evolved’ form of Ibsen’s dramas, seen in relation to the ‘bareness and bleakness of his little northern democracy’. Almost every critic or literary mediator who took part in what became a cultural and political battle over Ibsen in Britain in the late 1880s and early 1890s, be he or she what was termed an ‘Ibsenite’ or an ‘Anti-Ibsenite’ or something in between, seems to have felt a need to relate to the problem of Ibsen’s provincialism, and not just to his foreignness per se.
If we move beyond these inherited narratives and stereotypes, however, Ibsen’s Norway was, in certain significant ways, not the backwater imagined by many foreign critics. For one thing, Norway, and Denmark, to which it for cultural purposes still belonged (the union between the two countries had been dissolved in 1814, and Norway had since been in a union with Sweden), were import cultures in literary terms. With an extremely small literary and dramatic output of its own, Norwegian publishing and theatre were dominated by continental impulses. This meant that Ibsen was deeply familiar with the plays and conventions of nineteenth-century European drama. When he entered the profession, Norway had, furthermore, an emerging national theatre movement, one which, through first giving him experience as a theatre director at Det norske Theater (The Norwegian Theatre) in Bergen from the age of twenty-three, gave him an early chance of hands-on experience. Besides this came both a system of state stipends and an extraordinary Scandinavian, or more precisely Dano-Norwegian, book market which developed with Ibsen and helped secure his freedom as a writer. Well before he came to write the plays which appear in this volume, Ibsen was a commercially successful author in his home market, a much-admired writer and poet supported by the state; he had acquired the liberty to focus solely on his drama. In his writing, he redeployed the resources of his culture, which is, of course, not to say that he only operated from within existing norms. His plays were also about responding to a set of contemporary issues which came to be seen as European, if not international, in nature, and they included contestation, conflict and change. In this way Ibsen created something which was to be seen and experienced as new: contemporary tragedies of middle-class life.
An exaggerated emphasis on Ibsen’s twenty-seven years of exile from his native country – he left in the spring of 1864, spending his time in Italy and Germany, and only resettled in 1891 – may also have blinded us to the resources available to him at home, resources which must be taken into account if we are to understand his astonishing career. One of these paradoxical resources was the fact that the dominant genre of the nineteenth century, the novel, had not yet come into its own in Norway or Denmark. At the outset of Ibsen’s career, the drama was still a respectable option for a Norwegian writer. Contrary to the greatest writing talents in the larger European cultures, Ibsen therefore came to invest his energy and creativity in the renewal of, and, in a European context, the elevation of, the drama.
Over a period of just over twenty years, beginning in 1877 and ending in 1899, Ibsen produced a series of twelve plays which seemed to engage more or less directly with his contemporary world, i.e., with the plight of the middle classes in a capitalist society. His series of modern plays are all written in prose, which was not entirely new for Ibsen. He had tried it on contemporary material already in The League of Youth (1869), but then in the form of satire or prose comedy. And in what he intended to be his ‘main work’ (‘hovedværk’),10 his colossal drama of ideas set in Ancient Rome, Emperor and Galilean (1873), he had chosen to reject verse as the appropriate form for contemporary drama. The illusion which he wanted to produce was that of ‘the real’, Ibsen noted.11 ‘We no longer live in the age of Shakespeare’, he added, explaining that he had wanted to portray ‘human beings’. It had thus been necessary to reject the ‘language of the gods’. Emperor and Galilean was to be a new kind of tragedy, the playwright insisted, although he had still concerned himself with an emperor.
The Norwegian context was still crucial to Ibsen’s development, in the midst of his self-imposed exile: his fellow Norwegian and long-term rival, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, had started writing prose plays with contemporary topics two years earlier (A Bankruptcy, 1875), and this is likely to have influenced a change of direction. Georg Brandes, the influential Danish critic associated with the so-called ‘Modern Breakthrough’ in Scandinavia, had hailed these plays as finally heralding the introduction of a new era, that of ‘the now and reality’.12 Ibsen must also, more generally, have registered a ‘social turn’ in contemporary debates, one which meant a new interest in social issues, not just poverty or ‘the labour question’, but also the family and the ‘the woman question’. But form was clearly central to his new vision, as was, when he came to A Doll’s House, his eye for dramatic potential and conflict. When the playwright in 1883, ten years after Emperor and Galilean, looked back on his own choice of prose, he stressed ‘the much more difficult art of writing a consistently truthful language of reality’.13 These statements are also true of the plays which followed from 1877, but with one important difference: Ibsen shifts his attention to the here and now.
Ibsen’s plays were no longer to treat of topics from his nation’s distant past or of a classical subject matter. Nor do they concern themselves with the aristocracy or nobility. Not only does the playwright turn his attention to contemporary society, while creating his own artistic mythology; he decides to scrutinize the life of a particular, emerging class. ‘No other writer’, Franco Moretti asserts, ‘has focused so single-mindedly on the bourgeois world’.14 Workers are hardly present in Ibsen’s twenty-year-long experiment, Moretti notes, because the ambition is to explore conflicts ‘internal to the bourgeoisie itself’. The wrongdoings perpetrated within these plays characteristically inhabit ‘an elusive grey area’, an area of ‘reticence, disloyalty, slander, negligence, half truths’. It is this grey area Ibsen explores with such painstaking attention; it is within this grey area that the characters of his play operate. While a number of Ibsen’s central characters, and perhaps also the playwright himself, may seem to entertain dreams of absolute freedom and truth, such ideals are never achieved. Ibsen is one of the great chroniclers of such greyness, of muddle and untidiness, of the less than perfect, of everyday life.
The first play in this volume begins by thematizing the backwardness of Norway. In the very first scene of Pillars of the Community, Rørlund, the schoolmaster, dismisses all ‘these larger societies and communities’ (the original word is ‘samfund’) as ‘whited sepulchres’. ‘Out there’ is immorality, the subversion of family values, general rottenness and corruption. At home the task is to ‘close the door’ to the outside world. Rørlund goes on to suggest to his lady friends that they ‘shut ourselves off a little from this’, and then draws the curtains. But already at the end of this act the exiled Lona Hessel has arrived from America with a declared intention of letting in ‘some fresh air’. So she goes on to do, and that in a number of ways. But it is hard not to think of this line as also representing Ibsen’s poetics, part of what he wants to achieve with the play and, perhaps, more generally, by opening up the territory of his chosen art form, the drama. And while he clearly began by wanting to expose his fellow countrymen’s insularity, his works soon came to appear as acutely relevant to others than the original audience. Among other things they seemed to question any kind of self-satisfied position, any contentedness with the status quo, the lack of ability to adopt other perspectives than one’s own. From a two-way movement, then, between home and abroad, periphery and centre, indoors and outdoors, smugness and openness, stems much of the dynamic of Pillars of the Community, as well as some of its central concerns. And these are issues that continue to be explored, albeit in ever new ways, through both radical and subtle changes in perspective, throughout the remainder of Ibsen’s plays.
Samfundets støtter, Pillars of the Community, was published in Copenhagen (Ibsen had opted for the Danish publisher Gyldendal since the publication of Brand (1866), and had, from this point onwards, reached a substantially larger readership and obtained greater financial security) on 11 October 1877. By this time, Ibsen had already made something of a name for himself in Germany. An authorized German edition was rushed out in November 1877, but – the playwright’s copyright not being protected – it was followed by two unauthorized translations within the next two months. The sales at home also exceeded expectations, and the first edition of 7,000 copies sold out within days. From about this time onwards, Ibsen insisted that book publication would precede first performances, and these followed in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in November and December. In Germany, the play’s success in the theatres was phenomenal; in early February 1878 it was played in five different Berlin theatres at the same time, and had been produced by twenty-six other German theatres by the end of the year.
Ibsen should, in other words, not be thought of as a marginalized or avant-garde writer at this point. He was established as one of the leading writers in Norway as well as in Denmark, and was a commercial success in both Scandinavia and Germany.15 In Britain the play’s fate was somewhat different. The critic who later went on to become Ibsen’s main translator and most important mediator, William Archer, managed to have it produced in adapted form in December 1880 in London, under the title Quicksands, but without success. The play did not appear in book form in English until 1888, but then as the lead play in Ibsen’s first English-language publishing success, The Pillars of Society, and Other Plays (which included Ghosts and An Enemy of the People), edited by Archer and with an introduction by the social reformer, physician and psychologist Havelock Ellis. The year after, the theatre columnist of The Sunday Times ironically admitted that the play ‘may excite Scandinavian audiences’, while noting the absolute need of adaption to ‘English theatrical conditions’, unless The Pillars of Society become ‘the pillows of society’.16
The play’s proper title is a metaphor and, it becomes clear, a delusion. The pillars of society, and not least this society’s main pillar, Consul Bernick, are, by the end, shown to be less than solid, not least as ‘moral support’. The action takes place in Bernick’s house in ‘a moderately small Norwegian coastal town’, and it is from this place that the movement between ‘out there’ and ‘at home’ is activated. What sets the plot in this well-made and fairly conventional four-act play in motion is the return from ‘out there’, that is America, of Lona Hessel and her half-brother Johan Tønnesen. These two arrive back in a small community which is just on the verge of radical change, through the arrival of the railway. The consul’s behaviour in relation to his community, as well as an episode from his and Johan’s shared past, drive the plot on. Slowly, as much through action as through talk, the murky past and the morally dubious behaviour of Bernick are revealed, and his and his class’s questionable, paternalistic concern for their local community is exposed.
Ibsen’s satire in Pillars is fierce, and it may be interpreted as the exile’s perspective on his native Norway, the writer at this point having lived abroad, in Italy and Germany, for thirteen years. But it is also, and perhaps more interestingly, critical of simple oppositions between us and them. In the end, the world at home is not quite so ideal, nor the world out there perhaps quite so corrupt, as Rørlund would have us believe. The issue of provincialism, then, was being explored by Ibsen in his art; quite apart from being an important and perhaps inescapable feature of his own early reception abroad.
In the play Ibsen explores the function of lying and the costs of truth in bourgeois society, as well as showing how many may have reasons to long for a different social contract, one based on truth, freedom and equality. ‘And you call yourselves the pillars of the community’, a shocked Lona Hessel exclaims. But the play should not be reduced to a simple or symmetrical opposition of truth against lies; it is rather, as Inga-Stina Ewbank has suggested, a more ‘arabesque-like enquiry into why we say what we say’.17 In spite of the play’s conciliatory ending, with the consul’s response to the wonderfully ironic procession in his honour, it is hardly clear that he has passed the moral tests he has been exposed to through the plot’s various twists and turns. While there is a real leap between this and Ibsen’s next play in terms of its radicalism, we may nevertheless ask whether we should trust the reformist conclusion of this play or consider it ironic.18 Long before we get to this point, something more fundamental than an individual consul’s conversion has in any case been shown to be at stake, and it is worth noting that Bernick’s final declaration echoes Rørlund’s parodic speech in which he proclaims the coming of ‘a new age’, one of truth. It is far from clear how far Bernick’s transformation goes.19
The title’s term ‘samfund’ comes up in a great number of different contexts throughout the play, and is contested from the very beginning. ‘My community is not the consul’s community’, pronounces Aune, the shipwright, in the play’s first scene. Nor is this community, importantly, a community for women. Hilmar Tønnesen scoffs at the conservative Rørlund’s reading matter, Woman as Servant to the Community, and Lona Hessel not only articulates a demand for change, she embodies it by simply behaving as men’s equal. She does not understand the notions of ‘duty’ which are being imposed on her, and claims that she lives in a society in which women are invisible: ‘you don’t see women’. In a number of respects, Lona prefigures ‘The New Woman’, the controversial ideal of the educated, fiercely self-sufficient woman that emerged in the 1880s and ’90s. With her it is as if we are hearing a new voice, the voice of a woman speaking up for herself and rejecting the roles imposed upon her by society. That is a voice that famously comes into its own in Ibsen’s next play.
Ibsen’s earliest notes for Pillars of the Community indicate that he had planned to make the position of woman in a man’s world of business the central concern, even if other themes in the end became more prominent. In his working notes for his next play, he went further, observing that ‘a woman cannot be herself in today’s society’, since this was exclusively male.20 ‘There are two kinds of moral law, two kinds of conscience,’ he added, drawing on essentialist notions of the relationship between the genders, ‘one in man and a completely different one in woman’.21 Men not only wrote the laws, Ibsen remarked, but they acted as both prosecutors and judges.
In addition to these early ideas there is, more specifically, no doubt that Ibsen had been inspired by the example of the author Laura Petersen Kieler, an acquaintance whom he may be said to have mentored, even calling her his ‘skylark’.22 Hoping to help heal her husband’s tuberculosis, Kieler had secretly borrowed money in order to finance a trip to Italy and, while not in the end committing it, later entered into forgery when she struggled to repay the loan. Importantly, however, the similarities between Laura and Nora stop there. While Kieler’s husband had her locked up in a mental hospital and managed to gain custody over their children, before, two years later, letting her back into the family, Ibsen’s Nora has recourse to another solution: she rebels.
While not his greatest play in aesthetic terms, A Doll’s House is Ibsen’s greatest international achievement. Nora can, moreover, be counted among the most significant female characters in world drama, along with Antigone, Medea and Juliet.23 How can such an astounding and durable success be accounted for? The theatre historian Julie Holledge identifies three key factors which most often come up in response to this question. The first is aesthetic innovation, with the play being seen as introducing a new form of psychological realism in the theatre, not least in its representation of female characters. The second is Nora’s iconic status in women’s struggle for subjective freedom, and the third the special connection created between the audience and the play’s lead character. One of the reasons behind Ibsen’s phenomenal success in the theatre is no doubt related to his appeal within the profession, and particularly to actresses.
When he wrote to his Danish publisher three months before the play’s publication, Ibsen claimed that the play would ‘touch on problems, which must be called particularly topical’.24 The title Et Dukkehjem creates the impression that we, as readers and spectators, are invited to peer into a home where human beings, and women in particular, are, metaphorically, reduced to dolls. There is a contraction here of the larger social world we have witnessed in Pillars of the Community, and the action takes place over only a few days, showing Nora Helmer’s transformation from doll to independent woman.
A Doll’s House has no genre designation other than ‘A Play in Three Acts’, though Ibsen had referred to it as ‘the tragedy of contemporary life’ (‘nutids-tragedien’, literally ‘the tragedy of the now’) in his notes.25 The play was published in Copenhagen on 4 December 1879, and the first edition of 8,000 copies sold out almost immediately. A Doll’s House in fact had a relatively positive first reception in Norway, and Ibsen was almost universally praised for the play’s formal features, even if some queried its ideas. The reviews were followed, however, by a more heated debate on Nora’s choice, supposed immorality and on gender roles more generally.
So what does Nora in the end react or rebel against? Torvald Helmer is a lawyer who, when the play begins, has finally achieved financial security as director of the local bank. After years of illness and financial struggle, a new life seems to open up for his family of five. The first act gives us an irresponsible and rather lightheaded Nora, a product of a patronizing and protective husband and, before that, we later learn, a similarly minded father, who has treated her as his ‘doll child’. The power of naming, as well as the power to make laws and establish norms, the play suggests, is a male form of power. Torvald’s use of a variety of pet names for her, such as ‘squirrel’ and ‘song-lark’, is one of the ways in which the relationship is performed. In the first act it is already hinted that Nora has taken on responsibility, however, if in a misguided way, and that there are other sides to her than those which she displays in her husband’s presence. When she understands that what she sees as her own brave action is not exempt from punishment by the legal system, she observes that this must be a ‘bad law’. The statement is on one level naive; on another level it is an indictment on how the law more generally regards women in her society. As the plot gradually unravels and the tension builds, Nora matures, so rapidly that it has always represented an artistic challenge to the actress playing the lead role.
The tarantella dance at the end of Act Two is a key scene, one which is equally characterized by authenticity and theatricality, in which the other and new Nora surfaces.26 She dances, her husband observes, ‘as if your life depended on it’, and when he later, in Act Three, considers her performance, he notes that there may have been something just a little ‘over-natural’ about it. At this stage Nora decides to throw off her ‘masquerade costume’ and utters the now famous words: ‘you and I have a lot to talk about’. The ensuing conversation not only demonstrates her quest for autonomy and freedom, and Torvald’s inadequate responses to her arguments and demands, it also shows how deeply connected her unhappy situation is with society’s regulation of the relationship between the sexes. I am ‘first and foremost a human being’ (often, in ideologically significant ways, mistranslated as ‘individual’ in English), Nora asserts, and her strong conviction that her womanhood, and the expectations invested in that womanhood, are secondary strengthens her resolve to make a radical choice: a break with both husband and – with necessity, due to her legal position – her children:
HELMER: Leave your home, your husband and your children! And you haven’t a thought for what people will say.
NORA: I can’t take that into consideration. I just know that it’ll be necessary for me.
HELMER: Oh, this is outrageous. You can abandon your most sacred duties, just like that?
NORA: What, then, do you count as my most sacred duties?
HELMER: And I really need to tell you that! Aren’t they the duties to your husband and your children?
NORA: I have other equally sacred duties.
HELMER: You do not. What duties could they be?
NORA: The duties to myself.
Nora’s existential choice seems to be forced upon her by society. But in adopting her husband’s and society’s language, so often used to contain and control women, she now speaks of her ‘duties’ towards herself, even ‘sacred’ ones. For some early Ibsen critics this meant that the play was ‘all self, self, self!’; for others, such as the feminists who gathered to watch the first proper London production of the play, it represented ‘either the end of the world or the beginning of a new world for women’.27
One of the recurring issues in the criticism of A Doll’s House is whether it is a play about the emancipation of women or about human freedom more generally. From a gender perspective, Toril Moi notes, the play’s key sentence is precisely Nora’s insistence that she is first and foremost a human being.28 In a radical refusal to stick to inherited notions of women’s role in family and society, Nora rejects the other identities available to her, both as ‘doll’ and as self-sacrificing ‘wife and mother’, and the play captures a historical transition of women moving from a status of ‘generic family member’ to becoming ‘individuals’.29 It is also, it may be added, a rejection of Torvald’s ‘pet names’ for her.
How can the fact of two people living together (the ‘samliv’ of the original) become a true marriage, Nora wonders. If A Doll’s House is nothing less than ‘a revolutionary reconsideration of the very meaning of love’, it is because it articulates new demands on the institution of marriage, as one between equals.30 And these demands originate in the situation of a particular individual, a woman. In spite of Ibsen’s early ideas about certain essential differences between man and woman, as expressed in his notes, the play itself effectively breaks with the notion of ‘separate spheres’.31 And it finds its dramatic material in the tension between ‘difference’ and ‘equality’. While at first seemingly basing his claim for equality on difference, in the end the play may seem to stress sameness. But it is not quite as simple as this, and Ibsen refused to give an answer. Does Nora want to be an ‘individual’ in Helmer’s sense? Her situation and longings can of course be generalized or shared by other human beings, but historically the performance of this play, it may be worth remembering, has ‘depend[ed] on a female body’.32 Sameness and difference continue to play themselves out as an unresolved paradox, and this tension is part of the continued attraction of A Doll’s House.
Variations on the key term ‘vidunderlig’ occur throughout A Doll’s House and are central to the play’s conclusion. In a fashion typical of Ibsen’s language, these central clusters of words expand and gather weight through being used in a number of different contexts, here, from the play’s beginning, with reference to material well-being and then to Nora’s romantic fictions.33 The term is close to ‘wonderful’, but stronger, and while ‘the miracle’ contains too powerfully religious connotations, this translation has opted for the somewhat weaker adjectival forms, such as ‘the miraculous’ and ‘the miraculous thing’. At the end of the play, something larger than a carefree material life or romantic love is shown to be at stake, something relating to a new, shared consciousness of mutuality.
The custom on the Victorian stage was to subject foreign drama, which was primarily imported from Paris, to thorough domestication. Characters, plots, cultural and moral codes were anglicized. Upon his arrival in the English-speaking world, Ibsen was initially exposed to the same treatment. In the soppy 1884 London adaptation of A Doll’s House, called Breaking a Butterfly, the Torvald Helmer figure (renamed Goddard) takes the blame for his wife’s forgery upon himself and forgives her (Flora or ‘Flossie’) in an intensely patronizing way. Towards the end of the play she proclaims that her husband has shown himself to be ‘a thousand times too good for me’, and in his last line, as he burns the compromising, forged note, Goddard can happily observe that ‘Nothing has happened, except that Flossie was a child yesterday: to-day she is a woman.’34 And no one leaves; the status quo is re-established.
It is difficult to get further away from the original, and it took five more years until the play was successfully performed in English, and in a more faithful version. This was the famous Novelty Theatre production, which premiered in London on 7 June 1889 and then went on a tour to Australia and New Zealand. The play’s theme and supposed message led to heated debate, but even the most conservative critics did not deny its effect on stage, or how it provided the leading actress, Janet Achurch, with a great role. The fact that a contemporary foreign playwright was treated with such respect, rather than being freely adapted and domesticated, was in itself striking. ‘Word for word Mr. Archer has faithfully translated the original play and not allowed one suggestion, however objectionable, to be glossed over,’ the conservative critic of the Daily Telegraph, Clement Scott, remarked.35 In a small way, this production also pointed towards more realistic staging and acting conventions in the Victorian theatre. The Novelty production made Ibsen’s name in Britain. On 1 July 1889 William Archer would note that ‘Ibsen has for the past month been the most famous man in the English literary world.’36
George Bernard Shaw, socialist and early ‘Ibsenite’, saw A Doll’s House as a radical turning point, and claimed that its crucial ‘new technical feature’ was ‘the discussion’.37 Until a certain point in the last act, Shaw noted in his polemical pamphlet The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), A Doll’s House might, if a few lines were excised, be turned into a conventional French play with its secrets, devices such as the letter box and sudden turns in the plot. But at that crucial moment the heroine ‘stops her emotional acting and says: “We must sit down and discuss all this that has been happening between us.” ’ Here, Shaw claimed, this play founded ‘a new school of dramatic art’.38
Many contemporary critics found this move fundamentally untheatrical, however, due to its lack of dramatic action, and later writers on the drama have also characterized Ibsen’s form as novelistic.39 It was not only a matter of a new and more complex psychology which broke with the old dramaturgy of stock characters and clear, easily recognizable gestures and emotions. Ibsen’s ‘retrospective technique’, in which many of the most significant events have taken place before the play begins, and are only gradually revealed, is even more prominent in the next play, Ghosts. This technique had its antecedents in Greek tragedy and Sophocles in particular, but what was new was Ibsen’s reactivation of it at a new juncture in history, at a different point in the development of the genre.
The final slamming of the street door remains one of the most famous endings in the history of Western theatre and it may, as much as Shaw’s favoured ‘discussion’, symbolically represent the beginning of modern drama. But this ending, including the expressed longing for the ‘miraculous thing’, is, importantly, one without definite closure. From the first publication of A Doll’s House the play has engendered alternative endings, sequels, prequels, adaptations, parodies and new artistic responses of all kinds, like few other plays in the canon. A Doll’s House has, more generally, proved itself astonishingly adaptable to new contexts; it still seems to contain stories that need to be told.
A Doll’s House was seen as a strong challenge to society’s gender and family norms. But it was his next play, which Ibsen finished during the autumn of 1881, which he ended up calling ‘A Family Drama’. After the reception of A Doll’s House, Ibsen, so often the master of reinvention, set himself a new task. Ghosts can be read as an exploration of what would have happened if Nora had chosen to stay, although the play should not, of course, be reduced to this. Mrs Alving is a woman who, we learn, left her husband after a year of marriage, but was subsequently persuaded to return. This episode and this choice come back to haunt her.
The setting is Mrs Alving’s estate by a ‘large fjord in West Norway’, and the scene is one of rain, fog and general greyness. As with Pillars of the Community and A Doll’s House, the movement is again one between an enclosed space and another, larger and freer one, outdoors or elsewhere. In Mrs Alving’s son Osvald’s case this elsewhere is Paris.40 But the movement is also, and perhaps more significantly, between different times, between a now and various thens; the ghosts (‘Gengangere’) of the play are reminders of the fact that the now is full of continuities, of different pasts that collide in violent and sometimes shocking ways in the present. In its slow, retrospective unravelling of the past, the play concerns itself with such issues as heredity, memory, causality and history, quite apart from Ibsen’s familiar explorations of truth and freedom.
Ghosts was Ibsen’s greatest succès de scandale and helped place him as a central figure of the European avant-garde. Thematizing, among other subjects, divorce, venereal disease, prostitution, incest and euthanasia, the play was bound to challenge not only the dominant aesthetic idealism of the time, but also various forms of censorship, official and unofficial. Ghosts became a central play for the new, independent theatre movement in Europe in the 1880s and ’90s.
Within the play, a battle of ideas, ideals, beliefs and conventions is being played out between Mrs Alving and Pastor Manders. Like Nora, albeit belatedly and too late, Mrs Alving claims that she has to work her way ‘out to freedom’. The idea of her son Osvald having inherited his father’s disease functions as an image, as one of several manifestations of the past in the present, of the things that come back to haunt the characters. In Mrs Alving’s definition of ‘ghosts’ or the ‘ghost-like’ (‘gengangeragtige’) in the second act, these are not just matters of inheritance from mother and father, but also of all sorts of dead ideas and beliefs. This general idea of inheritance is one that overrides what we now know are incorrect facts – the hints that syphilis, although it is never mentioned explicitly in the play, is being passed down from father to son – which Ibsen employs to such dramatic and philosophical effects. We are so ‘wretchedly frightened of the light, all of us’, Mrs Alving concludes. The word ‘lysrædd’ is one of the Dano-Norwegian compounds that tend to defy translation, but it also belongs to a group of Ibsenian neologisms which draw particular attention to themselves in the original. These coinages are not common colloquial expressions; they are more than ‘the sum of the two words yoked together’, and create a new unit, ‘much like the two halves of a metaphor’.41 To be ‘mørkerædd’ is to be afraid of the dark, a common enough ailment and expression. But on this model Ibsen coins ‘lysrædd’, afraid of the light. Another central compound in the original is ‘livsglæden’, the joy of life, and at the end of the play Osvald, against his mother’s expressed wish – in a futile, utopian gesture – asks for the sun, having long since noted that the ‘joy of life’ is not really known here, at home.
The official date of publication of Ghosts was 13 December 1881, and a stoical Ibsen anticipated violent reactions. If the play did not create an uproar, it would not have been necessary to write it, he told his Danish publisher.42 As the author had predicted, Ghosts created a sensation. It was deemed not just to be deeply immoral, but also to break with established aesthetic norms, and the main Scandinavian theatres refused to stage it. At the beginning of 1882, Ibsen, who began to worry about book sales, wrote to the Danish author and theatre critic Sophus Schandorph, pointing out that he was not responsible for the opinions uttered by the characters of the play. In no other of his plays had the author been ‘so completely absent’ as in this last one.43 In fact, not ‘a single opinion, not a single utterance’ could be attributed to the author, Ibsen claimed. ‘I took great care in avoiding that.’
When the play was given its first British performance, ten years later, on 13 March 1891, the shock effect of Ghosts had certainly not worn out. The production staged by the Independent Theatre, which avoided the censor’s interference by formally organizing itself as a private club, has been called the ‘most sensational of all nineteenth-century premières’.44 The editorial of the country’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, did what it could to appeal to the theatre censor, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Ghosts was simple ‘in the sense of an open drain; of a loathsome sore unbandaged; of a dirty act done publicly; or of a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open’.45 This was not art. Rather than being an ‘Æschylus of the North’, Ibsen was like ‘one of his own Norwegian ravens’ hungry for ‘decayed flesh’. The ensuing debate led to well over 500 newspaper and journal items on Ibsen. When William Archer in an article called ‘Ghosts and Gibberings’ listed some of the abuse levelled at the Norwegian playwright, it became an effective piece of polemic, causing embarrassment to at least some of Ibsen’s most intemperate critics.46 But it was not until 1913 that the play was given a licence by the censor, and then after considerable debate within the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.
For a long time, Ghosts continued to be associated with scandal, and twenty years after its publication it stopped the ageing Ibsen from being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The statutes of the prize, established in 1901, demanded that it go to the person who had produced the most excellent work ‘in an idealist direction’.47 Considering his candidature in 1902, the Swedish Academy found that Ibsen was simply too enigmatic and negative.
In the later part of his career, Ibsen got into the habit of publishing a new play every other year. One of the unusual things about his next play, En folkefiende, An Enemy of the People, was that it appeared only one year after Ghosts. The book was available in Scandinavia on 28 November 1882. It no doubt stands in a fairly direct relationship to Ghosts, or, rather, to the public reactions to Ghosts. Ibsen was bitterly disappointed with the lack of support from the liberals at home in connection with the play. But while An Enemy of the People was in part intended as an attack on the ‘compact majority’, and on a press that was becoming a powerful factor in contemporary life, the playwright also wanted to produce a play that was different in kind from Ghosts. For a while he even considered calling it a ‘lystspil’, a light comedy with satirical dimensions, and in March 1882 he assured his Danish publisher that the play would be ‘peaceful’, and that it could be read by pillars of the community and their ladies, as well as played at the theatres.48 He was to be proven right.
This time the action takes place in ‘a coastal town in southern Norway’, which has set great hopes on the income from its new baths. When Dr Stockmann, the town spa’s medical officer, discovers that the baths are infected, he naively thinks that the town will honour him for his discovery. Instead he manages to unite the liberals and conservatives against him. Ibsen again, and perhaps more harshly than ever, satirizes the blinkered, self-interested and provincial perspectives of the small-town bourgeoisie.
While it is possible to approach the play biographically and see Dr Stockmann as the playwright’s self-portrait, a number of features complicate such readings. Stockmann is too much of a naive idealist, and to an extent too self-destructive. He does much to injure his own chances of succeeding, his fiery temperament leads him to extreme characterizations of his opponents, and his quest for recognition and authority comes across as slightly ridiculous and pompous. But he exists in a society built on a lie, and among people who are content with their old ideas and beliefs, whether the new ones be good or bad. There can be little doubt as to the play’s critical perspective on Stockmann’s small-town opponents, both old-time conservatives like his elder brother, the mayor, and new-time liberals like Aslaksen and Hovstad. The play’s didactic climax comes in the public meeting in the fourth act, where Stockmann formulates his philosophy of the one against the many: ‘The minority is always in the right.’ While the argument can be made that the play brings up the problem of a minority’s position within majority rule, it is difficult not to recognize the political implications of Dr Stockmann’s views, at a time when large democratizing processes were being both supported and resisted all over Europe. He is out to provoke:
And now let me turn to dogs, to whom we humans are so closely related. First, imagine a simple common dog – I mean, the kind of vile, ragged, badly behaved mongrels that run around in the streets fouling the house walls.
In contrast to such creatures, Stockmann points to ‘a poodle whose pedigree goes back several generations, and who comes from a noble house where it’s been fed with good food and had the chance to hear harmonious voices and music’. It is hardly odd that such a poodle is ahead of its mongrel relatives, the doctor suggests, that its ‘cranium has developed quite differently from that of the mongrel’: an ‘ordinary peasant mongrel’ would never be able to do the kind of tricks performed by a poodle.
Stockmann clearly wants to contrast the frustratingly conformist and unthinking masses with a progressive, noble minority, but these are ideas influenced by some of the more questionable Social Darwinist ideas of the time. The play’s ambiguous hero also questions the durability of truths, however, insisting that an ‘averagely built truth’ is rarely valid much longer than twenty years. It is such attacks on society’s seemingly stable values which help turn him into an ‘enemy of the people’. The result is broken glass, and isolation. At the end of the play, Stockmann does not claim that ‘the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone’, but, tellingly, ‘most alone’. Even this famous statement has a potentially ironic effect, surrounded as the protagonist is, in the play’s final tableaux, by wife and daughter. And while Petra seems to have faith in her father, his wife only smiles and shakes her head.
Soon the play was produced on all the main Scandinavian stages, and ten years later it became the first commercial success of sorts for Ibsen in Britain, when the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree brought it to the West End in June 1893. It happened in an admittedly domesticated and farce-like version, with Tree even impersonating Ibsen in the lead role. After this the critic of The Times, in a representative early response, expressed his pleasant surprise that this was a play ‘which everybody can understand’, rather than the usual Ibsen ‘full of enigmas and obscurities, intelligible only to the elect’.49 The Norwegian reception had been mixed but relatively friendly, even if a number of critics found it a weaker play than its predecessors. The play does not have characters with the kinds of complex inner lives characteristic of a Nora or a Mrs Alving. But a number of critics saw Dr Stockmann as a secular version of Brand, the fiery vicar protagonist of Ibsen’s great drama in verse.
Even if An Enemy of the People on the whole adheres to a classical construction, it has less of the discipline and artistic control generally associated with the mature Ibsen; there is more of the comic and outright burlesque. One of the fundamental conflicts is, as so often in Ibsen’s plays, that between the individual and society, only here it is distilled or heightened. Another tension is that between truth and convention, again portrayed in starker terms than before, and with greater and more obvious political implications. The five-act play’s somewhat caricatured lone hero has been subjected to a wide variety of appropriations, from those of early anarchists to German Nazis, who recognized a strong man opposed to the masses, to Arthur Miller’s adaptation for a McCarthyite America in the 1950s.
In the year 1900 the eighteen-year-old James Joyce wrote an essay on Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), in which he observed a tendency in the playwright’s later work ‘to get out of closed rooms’.50 While the four plays in this volume mostly take place within closed rooms, they display the beginnings of the same tendency. Lona Hessel pulls away the curtains and longs for fresh air, while Hovstad in An Enemy of the People speaks of ‘air[ing] this place out’, without, admittedly, ever getting around to doing it. The thematics of indoors and outdoors is there from the beginning of what, as Ibsen saw it, became a cycle of plays, and the broken windows after the public meeting in the fourth act of the last play in this volume may represent the difficulty of upholding clear boundaries between out there and in here, abroad and home, province and centre.
We treat Ibsen as a prominent figure in the Western canon, hailed as one of its great ‘titans’.51 That is testified to through the sheer number of performances, translations, editions and individual readings of his works throughout the world. The plays in this volume have, since Pillars of the Community was first published in 1877, continued to perform their ‘world-making’. And this has, of course, been dependent on the rapid canonization of these texts, on the fact that they have been made available to ever-new audiences, on page and stage. But it is important, because potentially more rewarding, that we try both to stage and to read Ibsen in ways which do not simply take his canonization for granted.52 One of the ways this can be done is perhaps in ‘reprovincializing’ him, remembering where he came from, not smoothing out his strangeness. In the process of these plays becoming classics certain things have been forgotten or erased, certain ghosts have not been evoked.
It is worth remembering that the specialness of a writer can be lost if we take him for granted, if we domesticate him too strongly, if we assume that he is too much like us. This Penguin edition wants to contribute to opening Ibsen up, to establishing premises for fresh approaches, through capturing the strangeness of his language, the individuality of his plays, how they each create their own storyworlds, through making readers and audiences aware of the historical contexts of these texts and some of the most significant of the many choices made in the process of translation.
From an early stage there was a sense in certain radical and avant-garde milieux throughout Europe that the new literature from Scandinavia and Russia was ‘the “classical” literature of their own time, or at least the artistic precursors of a coming classical literature’.53 The waves of cultural export from these hitherto peripheral regions became significant factors in the renewal of nineteenth-century literature, both the novel and the drama. But world literature and theatre always come from somewhere, and a work manifests itself differently at home than abroad, in another language and in other cultural contexts. At the same time, world literature, David Damrosch notes, is ‘always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture’.54 A reflection on such matters of exchange ought to be part of any approach to reading, studying, teaching and performing Ibsen in English.
One of the tasks the contemporary reader and interpreter of Ibsen (whether they encounter him on page or stage) may face, then, is to discover or rediscover the playwright’s strangeness; that is, to pull him off centre, to resist the many habitual readings to which he has been exposed, to avoid ‘reducing him to the familiar’, even as we try to understand him.55 At the same time, it is notable how Ibsen has been put to use, and to all kinds of different uses, for around 150 years since his Scandinavian breakthrough with Brand and how he is still being put to use today. In numerous languages, forms, adaptations and versions he still affects us, his plays continue to touch us, to stir and surprise us, to change the way we feel about and perceive reality.
With the major exception of Shakespeare, Ibsen is played more often around the world than any other playwright, most strikingly perhaps in countries like India, Bangladesh and China, and in parts of Africa, in addition to being alive in the classical repertory of European and American theatres. Ibsen’s plays, in short, still seem capable of letting in fresh air, of creating newness or otherness in the world, of gaining in translation. And even if some of his plays are less polyphonous and composite than others, his own genuinely quizzical poetics can be adopted in relation to them all. As Ibsen put it in a much-quoted ‘rhymed letter’ written for the Danish critic Georg Brandes’s journal Det nittende Aarhundrede (The Nineteenth Century) in 1875: ‘I do but ask; my call is not to answer’.56 The answering or interpreting must be up to us, his readers, spectators, co-creators.
Tore Rem, University of Oslo
1. Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), p. 181.
2. William Archer, ‘The Real Ibsen’ [1901], in Thomas Postlewait, ed., William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889–1919 (London: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 53–68 (p. 54).
3. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 288.
4. See ‘A Note on the Translation’ in this volume.
5. See Emily Apter and her criticism of world literature and a ‘translatability assumption’, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), p. 3.
6. Rolf Fjelde chose A Doll House for his translation, thus correctly rejecting the genitive form, while not substituting ‘Home’ for ‘House’; see Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays (New York: Penguin, 1978). The Norton edition of Ibsen’s Selected Plays, translated by Rick Davis and Brian Johnston, has followed suit. This alternative cannot be said to have won out in popular usage, though.
7. Frederic Wedmore, ‘Ibsen in London’, The Academy, 15 June 1889, xxxv, pp. 419–20, in Michael Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 107–8 (p. 108).
8. Frederic Wedmore, ‘Ibsen Again’, The Academy, 27 July 1889, pp. 60–61, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, p. 132.
9. Henry James, review of John Gabriel Borkman, Harper’s Weekly, 6 February 1897, xlv, no. 2094, p. 78, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 364–5; and ‘On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler’, New Review, June 1891, iv, pp. 519–30, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 234–44 (p. 244).
10. Henrik Ibsen to Frederik V. Hegel, 12 July 1871, http://www.ibsen.uio.no/brev.xhtml.
11. Henrik Ibsen to Edmund Gosse, 15 January 1874, http://www.ibsen.uio.no/brev.xhtml.
12. ‘Literatur. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: “En Fallit” og “Redaktøren” ’, Det nittende Aarhundrede (1875), p. 241.
13. Henrik Ibsen to Lucie Wolf, 25 May 1883, http://www.ibsen.uio.no/brev.xhtml.
14. Moretti, The Bourgeois, p. 169.
15. It should be noted, however, that Ibsen’s success in Germany was more tentatively connected with his name at this stage; it was primarily a matter of traditional theatre conventions and star actresses. See Ståle Dingstad, Den smilende Ibsen (Oslo: Akademika Forlag, 2013), pp. 167–80.
16. The Sunday Times, 21 July 1889, p. 7, quoted in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, p. 3.
17. Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘Ibsen’s Language: Literary Text and Theatrical Context’, in The Yearbook of English Studies (Birmingham: MHRA, 1979), pp. 102–15 (p. 115).
18. Cf. Bjørn Hemmer, ‘Ibsen and the Realistic Problem Drama’, in James McFarlane, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 68–88 (pp. 77–8).
19. See Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 221, and Hemmer, ‘Ibsen and the Realistic Problem Drama’, p. 77.
20. Henrik Ibsens Skrifter (HIS), vol. 7k, p. 191 (digital edition: www.ibsen.uio.no).
21. See James W. McFarlane, ed. and trans., The Oxford Ibsen, 8 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), vol. 5, pp. 436–7.
22. For a short version of this story in English, see e.g. Joan Templeton, Ibsen’s Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 135–7.
23. Julie Holledge, ‘Addressing the Global Phenomenon of A Doll’s House: An Intercultural Intervention’, Ibsen Studies 8, no. 1 (2008), pp. 13–28.
24. Henrik Ibsen to Frederik V. Hegel, 2 September 1879. http://www.ibsen.uio.no/brev.xhtml.
25. HIS, vol. 7k, p. 210.
26. See Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, pp. 236–42.
27. Clement Scott, ‘A Doll’s House’, Theatre (July 1889), xiv, pp. 19–22, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, p. 114; Edith Lees Ellis, Stories and Essays (Berkeley Heights: Free Spirit Press, 1924), p. 128.
28. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, p. 226.
29. Ibid., pp. 244 and 247; for another discussion of the tensions between ‘universalist’ and ‘feminist’ readings, see Templeton, Ibsen’s Women, pp. 110–45.
30. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, p. 247.
31. Templeton, Ibsen’s Women, p. 137.
32. Julie Holledge, ‘Pastor Hansen’s Confirmation Class: Religion, Freedom, and the Female Body in Et Dukkehjem’, Ibsen Studies 10, no. 1 (2010), pp. 3–16 (p. 3).
33. For a longer discussion of the uses of this word, see Brian Johnston, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Ibsen’s Selected Plays, pp. xi–xxi (p. xix). But Johnston’s edition has chosen to translate ‘det vidunderlige’ with ‘wonderful’.
34. Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman, Breaking a Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts, LCC 53271, British Library.
35. Scott, unsigned notice, Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1889, p. 3, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 101–3 (p. 101).
36. Cf. Michael Egan, ‘Introduction’, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 1–39 (p. 5).
37. Bernard Shaw, ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’, in Major Critical Essays (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 23–176 (pp. 160–64).
38. Ibid., pp. 163–4.
39. Cf. Peter Szondi, ‘Ibsen’, in Charles R. Lyons, ed., Critical Essays on Henrik Ibsen (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1987), pp. 106–11 (pp. 110–11).
40. See Paul Binding’s assessment of Osvald the artist, With Vine-Leaves in His Hair (Norwich: Norvik Press, 2006), pp. 21–46.
41. Ewbank, ‘Ibsen’s Language: Literary Text and Theatrical Context’, pp. 107–8.
42. Henrik Ibsen to Frederik V. Hegel, 23 November 1881, http://www.ibsen.uio.no/brev.xhtml.
43. Henrik Ibsen to Sophus Schandorph, 6 January 1882, http://www.ibsen.uio.no/brev.xhtml.
44. Nicholas de Jongh, Politics, Prudery and Perversions (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 29. See also theatre historian Jean Chothia’s account, English Drama of the Early Modern Period, 1890–1940 (London: Longman, 1996).
45. Editorial comment in the Daily Telegraph, 14 March 1891, p. 5, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 189–93 (p. 190).
46. William Archer, ‘Ghosts and Gibberings’, Pall Mall Gazette, 8 April 1891, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 209–14.
47. Cf. Tore Rem, ‘Afterword to Ghosts’, in Said about Ibsen – By Norwegian Writers, trans. Robert Ferguson (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2006), pp. 34–40 (p. 34); Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, pp. 96–100.
48. Henrik Ibsen to Frederik V. Hegel, 16 March 1882. http://www.ibsen.uio.no/brev.xhtml.
49. Unsigned notice, The Times, 15 June 1893, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 298–9 (p. 298).
50. James Joyce, ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, in Lyons, ed., Critical Essays, pp. 37–53 (p. 52).
51. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 355. See Tore Rem, ‘ “The Provincial of Provincials”: Ibsen’s Strangeness and the Process of Canonisation’, Ibsen Studies 4, no. 2 (2004), pp. 205–26.
52. Hans-Robert Jauss, ‘The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding’, in James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (eds.), Reception Study (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 7–28 (p. 25).
53. Georg Lukács, ‘Tolstoy and the Development of Realism’, in Lyons, ed., Critical Essays, pp. 99–105 (p. 102).
54. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, p. 283.
55. Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 11.
56. A somewhat freer translation has ‘I’d rather ask; my job’s not explanations’; cf. ‘A Rhyme-Letter’, in Ibsen’s Poems, trans. John Northam (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986), pp. 125–9 (p. 126).