fence and storms into the garden. At the same time DR. HERDAL, too,

  rushes down thither. A short pause.

  HILDA [Stares fixedly upwards and says, as if petrified.]

  My Master Builder!

  RAGNAR [Supports himself, trembling, against the railing.]

  He must be dashed to pieces—killed on the spot.

  ONE OF THE LADIES [Whilst MRS. SOLNESS is carried into the house.]

  Run down for the Doctor——

  RAGNAR

  I can’t stir a foot——

  ANOTHER LADY

  Then call to some one!

  RAGNAR [Tries to call out.]

  How is it? Is he alive?

  A VOICE [Below, in the garden.]

  Mr. Solness is dead!

  INSPIRED BY HENRIK IBSEN

  A NEW DRAMA

  Henrik Ibsen founded modern drama. For this he is not only remembered, he is worshiped; his home in Oslo, Norway, the site of the Ibsen Museum, has become a shrine, a veritable holy place in the world of theater. Among Ibsen’s disciples are some of the greatest dramatists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett. Shaw, who found the London theater scene of his day vacuous and stale, poured tremendous energy into popularizing Ibsen in the English-speaking world.

  Ibsen’s plays are continually revived in theaters around the world, have been adapted by August Strindberg and Arthur Miller, and have been made into dozens of films. Many of his memorable characters are women, and numerous renowned Shakespearean and film actresses—including Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Claire Bloom, Joan Collins, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Liv Ullmann—have played Anitra, Hedda, and Nora.

  JAMES JOYCE

  Though Ibsen is generally remembered for his use of plain, every day language, he was a great influence on the preeminent stylist of twentieth-century literature, James Joyce. So fervent was Joyce’s early loyalty to Ibsen that he taught himself Norwegian so that he could read Ibsen’s dramas in the original. Joyce’s first publication was “Ibsen’s New Drama,” an article on Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, that appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1900 and in which Joyce declared that Ibsen was the pinnacle of Western Civilization. Ibsen sent a letter of thanks to Joyce, who was still an undergraduate. Joyce went on to write a poem entitled “Epilogue to Ibsen’s Ghosts.”

  Joyce most consciously imitated Ibsen in his play Exiles (1918), which has been compared to Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People for its political subject matter; yet Joyce’s play also deals with the domestic issues found in all of Ibsen’s plays. Indeed, the play reads more like Ibsen than Joyce, although it lacks the confident voice of either writer. The main character of Exiles is Richard Rowan, a writer living in Dublin; in the finale of the third act he speaks to his lover, Bertha:

  I have wounded my soul for you—a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness—for this I longed. And now I am tired for a while, Bertha. My wound tires me.

  Exiles opened in Munich in 1919 but was not a success.

  MUSIC

  Onstage an Ibsen production is a symphony of awkward silences, dissonance, and the thunderous cacophony of the characters’ inner lives, and it follows that composers would attempt to harness that vitality in their music. Among those who have taken Ibsen’s work as an inspiration for their own are Norma Beecroft, Antonio Bibalo, Mark Brunswick, Werner Egk, Edward Harper, and Harald Saeverud.

  In 1874 Ibsen commissioned Edvard Grieg to write the incidental music for a staging of Peer Gynt; the production set to music premiered on February 24, 1876, and was an immediate and resounding success. Much of Grieg’s international reputation rests on the Peer Gynt Suites, which are some of the most frequently played pieces in today’s symphonic repertoire. In these pieces, which combine dramatic orchestral music with catchy, memorable tunes, Grieg captures the landscape of the Peer Gynt legend—for example, the rising of the sun in the first movement—along with the passion of Ibsen’s drama and its characteristic moments of suspense, celebration, and devastating lament. The fourth movement of the first Peer Gynt Suite, “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” is a tumultuous, epic chase scene that has become a classical music standard and been featured as incidental music in several films. The suites as Grieg published them are:

  PEER GYNT SUITE I (OP. 46, published in 1888)1. Morning

  2. The Death of Åse

  3. Anitra’s Dance

  4. In the Hall of the Mountain King

  PEER GYNT SUITE II (OP. 55, published in 1893)1. The Abduction of the Bride. Ingrid’s Lament

  2. Arabian Dance

  3. Peer Gynt’s Homecoming (Stormy Evening on the Sea)

  4. Salvejg’s Song

  Grieg also set six of Ibsen’s poems to music (Op. 25). Today Edvard Grieg is widely regarded as Norway’s greatest composer. His work had an enormous influence on Bela Bartok, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel.

  COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the plays. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

  COMMENTS

  Robert Bridges, writing under the pseudonym “Droch”

  Since we live a very little while and have so many beautiful things to choose to see and so many pleasant people to know, why should an intelligent man deliberately select what is unlovely and disagreeable? And yet a considerable number of intelligent people are of choice reading Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” and they believe that they find in it an unusual amount of mental sustenance. We do not live for pleasant sensations, they say, but for truth, and here is truth that is valuable. It is probable that this point-of-view appeals most vigorously to that class of mind which believes that it is “literary,” which looks on the spectacle of life as a conglomerate of strange things to be classified by their eccentricities. After a decade of this attitude toward his fellow-beings the literary man is apt to consider valuable only what is unusual. He has got entirely out of a normal perspective, and the impressive pageant of an army of people leading sane, wholesome, and, in the main, happy lives, is to him the least interesting part of the picture.

  It is easy to see why “Hedda Gabler” appeals to this constituency—for it is a powerful presentation of the unusual and disagreeable. If we put aside our predilection for what is beautiful and pleasant, it is impossible not to come under the force and fascination of this drama. While firmly believing that there are inadequate reasons why people should write or read books of this kind, we can have no sympathy with the howl against this book that it is immoral. Stern, uncompromising morality is the lesson of it, with a most acute consciousness on every page of what Henry James has so pertinently called “the immitigability of our moral predicament.”

  We have heretofore pointed out that we cannot see in Ibsen’s works the pessimism with which he is usually credited—and this last (and most offensive of his dramas) confirms that opinion. Here, as in his other works, there is a character which points the way to a sane and wholesome way of living. In Miss Tesman the author shows good-will and good works, charity and simplicity weaving from day to day a happy life. And at the close of the play when trouble comes to Miss Tesman (as to all the rest of the characters), the author shows her clearly seeing her way out of it through her sympathies with the unfortunate.

  The “literary” people who are making so much ado over “Hedda Gabler,” must, if they really have their eyes open to its intention, receive some very acute thrusts. For it is difficult to recall a more telling exposure of the supreme selfishness of the literary point-of-view. There are two authors among the dramatis personae. One of them says of the woman who has sacrificed everything for him and has been the inspiration of his best work, “It is the courage of life and the defiance of life that she has snapped in me,”—and then protests that he is not “heartless.” The other man of letters is perfectly joyous when he hears that his wife has burned the manuscript of his rival and friend—because she tells him that she “could not bear the idea that anyone else should put you into the shade.” This he considers a final proof of her love, and is elated accordingly.

  Was there ever a better exhibition of the egotism of men who spend their lives seeking for a new emotion at any cost?

  —from Life Magazine (June 18, 1891)

  George Bernard Shaw

  A Doll’s House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.

  —from The Humanitarian (May 1895)

  William S. Bishop

  In Peer Gynt we have a drama of the human soul in its relation to its moral environment, to the great forces which play upon it from without, or work upon and through it from within. In its development through the changes and chances of a typical earthly career, through weakness and failure and consequent loss, we discern in Peer Gynt a parable of life. Peer himself is representative of a class of humanity, and of a large class. Not, indeed, of humanity in its highest and heroic development, for Peer is himself the antithesis of a hero; but although, or rather just because Peer does represent a distinctly unheroic type, in his very weaknesses, in his hedging, in his cowardice, he reminds us of what we are ourselves, or at least are inclined to be. The question on which Peer’s life hinges is the old question which the Danish prince Hamlet, as depicted by Shakespeare, had put to himself long ago—the question, “To be, or not to be?” But in the case of Peer it was not the mere bald question of existence or non-existence, whether now or after death. The question in Peer’s case is a subtler one. Existence—that is, some kind of existence after death, is certain. But the great problem before us here is: Existence of what kind? For all souls (such is Ibsen’s thought) will have a continuance after death. But of what sort the future existence will be will depend upon what sort of a life shall have been led by the individual in this earthly stage of being. As regarded from the standpoint of our poet-philosopher, there are upon earth two and only two classes of people. But Ibsen’s canon of classification is not—at least, is not primarily and directly—the moral one. Rather, it is a psychological or metaphysical one. In accordance with this standard, people are not classified as good or bad, like the sheep and the goats in the familiar parable of judgment. No! they are classified as those, on the one hand, who have been or who are content merely to live, to exist from day to day, satisfying the whims, or gratifying the passions, or allowing themselves to be molded by the environment of the moment; and, on the other hand, those who accentuate their individuality as superior to their environment; those to whom existence as mere existence is not sufficient, is not satisfying; those whose desire and aim and effort it is, not simply to be, but to be something, to be somebody; to achieve self-hood, personality. These two classes of persons include all humankind. And for these two classes two diverse sorts of fate are reserved. Those who have been satisfied with the mere fact of existing; those who have followed the egoist Troll-maxim, “To thyself be sufficient,” shall at last be turned into the casting-ladle, there to be melted up into the indistinguishable mass from which future souls are to be fashioned. Such souls will, it is true, continue to exist after death, but not as distinct individuals. Why? Simply because they have not achieved individuality during their earthly career. Neither by good deeds, nor yet by evil, have they given proof of a strong or robust self-hood. They have indeed been egoists in a sense, but only in a false sense. They have indulged the passions or the whims of the moment; but this is not true and genuine egoism. True and genuine egoism means individualism; that is, it means the development of individuality. It is this individuality, the transcendent value of it, the all-surpassing need of it that is Ibsen’s message in Peer Gynt. “Better to be a sinner than a non-entity.”

  —from The Sewanee Review (October 1909)

  Alma L. LaVictoire

  The majority of critics and students of drama speak of Ibsen, the dramatist, as an individualist. He is, to them, a man who believes, and who writes plays to support the belief, that an individual, be it man or woman, has the right to overturn existing social order for his own freedom and development, no matter how universally accepted or of what value to mankind this same order may be. . . .

  [In The Master Builder] Ibsen’s effort is toward construction rather than destruction, that instead of advocating individual freedom, he strives to point the way to adjustment of the universal order. This means, of course, the greatest freedom for the greatest number. Not individual freedom, but individual responsibility.

  In writing a play Ibsen is confronted by two problems. First, he has to utter a protest against certain wrongs that exist, for Ibsen is ever and always a reformer. Then, he must make his play enlist the interest and sympathy of his hearers, for, as he makes Rosmer say, “men are only ennobled from within.” Reformation endures only when it comes from the heart. There are few who would choose the wrong if right were clearly seen, and wrong and all that it means fully comprehended. Eliza Allen Starr described heaven as a place where right is so plainly seen that wrong is impossible. . . .

  [The Master Builder] is Ibsen’s protest against the motive of expediency, which is so great a factor in the world to-day, a protest against work not done for work’s sake. Anatole France says that a man who strives for the approval of posterity can never be great. It is not his name nor what he creates that is known to future generations. Other men have voiced the same idea in a different way. It is the Bible story of the five talents, the two talents, the one talent, in a new form. It is, too, the story of the house built on shifting sands.

  “The Master Builder” was written in the latter part of Ibsen’s life, when, after years of accomplishment and strife always for the fine and true, he could see that the greatest blessing and not the greatest hardship of life is work. That there is no satisfaction so deep, no pleasure so lasting, as good work well done.

  —from The North American Review (August 1912)

  Edward Garnett

  “What is really wanted is a revolution of the spirit of man,” wrote Ibsen to Brandes in 1870, and this saying actually reveals the source of Ibsen’s power over us better than any lengthy criticism could do. It is because Ibsen is so dissatisfied with average human nature, because he pierces through its self-regarding egoism and realizes its shallow pretentiousness that he has had the power to treat public opinion in ordinary as the Voice of mediocrity, without himself being either a superior person, or pessimist, or idealistic preacher. As a poet of insight Ibsen sympathizes with humanity, as a moralist he sets his face against the average man’s pettiness and self-complacency; it is this two-sidedness that makes him formidable to our middle-class communities so naïvely in love with their own special limitations, so bold in developing their life on material lines, so fearful of applying to themselves unwelcome truths.

  —from Friday Nights (1922)

  William Butler Yeats

  Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park A Doll’s House had been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to be played in England, and somebody had given me a seat for the gallery. In the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a middle-aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood up and said to the little boy at her side, “Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we will go now”; and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur, “A series of conversations terminated by an accident.” I was divided in mind, I hated the play; what was it but Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley and Tyndall all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.

  “Art is art because it is not nature,” I kept repeating to myself, but how could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because, though we had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I bought his collected works in Mr. Archer’s translation out of my thirty shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a success in Rosmersholm, where there is symbolism and a stale odour of spilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves involved in a quarrel with the supporters of old-fashioned melodrama, and conventional romance, in the support of the new dramatists who wrote in what the Daily Press chose to consider the manner of Ibsen.

  —from The Trembling of the Veil (1922)

  QUESTIONS

  1. Are any of Ibsen’s plays still shocking? If so, which ones? What is shocking about them?