ARTICLES ON IBSEN, 1995

There isn’t much wrong with current Ibsen criticism that a little verbal restraint wouldn’t cure. Some of the articles reviewed here are longer than their substance warrants, or are written in fashionable jargon, or both. More to the point: most of what is being written about Ibsen these days is sound and interesting—and sometimes new and important. I take it to be a sign of health that the variety in subject matter, approaches, and critical premises makes it difficult to generalize beyond saying that most of the articles are comparatist/relational. That is, they are variants, including studies of influence, of the “Ibsen and ___” type.

Inga-Stina Ewbank always makes good sense in lean prose. In “Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Rome” (1) she argues that Ibsen’s “two Roman plays do not simply represent, respectively, acceptance and rejection of Shakespeare,” as old conventional wisdom would have it. Emperor and Galilean “is in some important ways more Shakespearean than Catiline and ... the contrast between them, in terms of Shakespearean transmission, is that between an externally imposed form on the one hand, and an intuitively absorbed and transmuted form on the other.” The Shakespeare Ibsen knew when he wrote Catiline came to him filtered through German and Danish Romanticism. His play is not concerned with historical truth or political morals but with Catiline’s personal ambition. Catiline is a self-dramatizing Byronic hero, acting out his young author’s ideological frustration after the 1848 revolutions. Only to the extent that his utopianism and division of soul are like Brutus’ and Hamlet’s is he “Shakespearean,” and only to that extent—Catiline as Stunn und Drang rebel— does Ibsen approve of him. Older critics who thought Ibsen endorsed the reveller and seducer were wrong. That is not to say that his play has the rich resonance of Ben Jonson’s Catiline‘s Conspiracy.

Historically more accurate than Catiline, Emperor and Galilean, like its predecessor, has an idealistic but flawed protagonist, who, like Shakespeare’s Brutus, promotes a noble vision that fails because it clashes “with historical necessity.” Ibsen wrote Emperor and Galilean in prose, because “we no longer live in Shakespeare’s time” (letter to Edmund Gosse, 1874), but succeeds, like Shakespeare, in making ancient Rome immediately real by means of vivid details of language and staging. Ewbank seeks to correct old ways of using Shakespeare to gauge the difference between Ibsen’s two Roman plays. In doing so her attention to small specifics of imagery, allusion, and scenography also amounts—and not incidentally—to support (but not proof) for Ibsen’s view that Emperor and Galilean was the crucial play in his canon.

Thomas Van Laan’s subject is the general influence of Shakespeare on Ibsen. (2) Ibsen almost certainly first encountered Shakespeare not in texts (Edvard Lembkhe’s Danish translations began appearing only in 1861), but in Danish and German productions during his study tour in 1852. Though there are traces of Shakespeare in St. John’s Night, The Burial Mound, and Lady Inger, contemporary Danish fairy tale plays, Oehlenschläger, and Scribe were probably more important sources and models. Ibsen’s poem “King Haakon’s Banqueting Hall” (1858) is “Shakespearean” because it compares King Lear and his ungrateful daughters to the medieval ruin shamefully neglected by contemporary Norwegians. (Van Laan might have added that a borrowing from Shakespeare in however crucial an analogy does not, by itself, make a work Shakespearean in an any more profound sense.)

In The Vikings at Helgeland, Ibsen for the first time successfully used the retrospective structure, which he abandoned in what Van Laan (after Michael Meyer) calls the “epic quartet” of The Pretenders, Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean. All four plays have actions that develop chronologically, like Shakespeare’s. Only in the realistic prose plays do Ibsen’s plots again begin before the play begins.

Van Laan juxtaposes Dr. Stockman and Coriolanus, Hjalmar and Othello (with Gregers as lago), Hedda Gabler and Antony and Cleopatra (the two contrasting “worlds”, the woman’s grand, redemptive suicide). These pairings are too close to the surface to qualify as “underground” traces of Shakespeare, which is all that Van Laan otherwise finds in Ibsen’s final plays. The one trace he notes is faint, a “non-explicit, deep structural allusion suggesting that the contemporary middle-class action is as legitimate for tragedy as the more heroic action of the famous tragic drama it implicitly echoes.”

Mutual influence, thematic rather than formal, is the subject of Van Laan’s “Ibsen and Strindberg: Interactions in the 1880s.” (3) Single plays in each canon are correlated in support of the thesis that Strindberg’s plays The Father, Comrades, Miss Julie, and Creditors were to a considerable extent produced in reaction to—and especially against—Ibsen, and that this burst of plays in turn had a major impact on Ibsen that is evident in several important ways in Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder.

And not just Strindberg’s plays: his short story collection Giftas (1884) includes a story titled A Doll House in defiance of Ibsen’s play (which Strindberg in his preface to the collection calls “romantic nonsense”). In A Madman’s Defense (1888) Strindberg sees a caricature of himself in Hjalmar Ekdal and from that piece of paranoia assumes his own wife’s infidelity. Strindberg’s anti-feminism is again on display in Comrades and Creditors. In the latter, the wife Tekla treats her (second) husband in the same playfully condescending way in which Torvald Helmer treats Nora. The process is that which Strindberg in an essay on Rosmersholin, with reference to what Rebecca did to Beata, called “soul murder.”

The reverse influence is evident in the closeness of the plot synopsis of Hedda Gabler to that of Upon Payment, a story in Giftas 11(1885). But where Evert Sprinchorn (in an essay in a festschrift for Eric Bentley, ed. Michael Bertin, 1981) sees Hedda as an exaggerated Laura-Tekla, Van Laan sees her as Nora ten years later. Helen in Strindberg’s story is a frigid and manipulative feminist, always viewed from the outside and one-dimensionally unsympathetic. In contrast, Hedda’s inner life is very much part of the overt meaning of Ibsen’s play, and so is her complexity of character, morally and socially. “Ibsen,” writes Van Laan, “is not out-Strindberging Strindberg but critiquing him.” The creator of Furia and Hjørdis did not need Strindberg for models of strongminded, erotic women. Hedda’s suicide is more plausible and ambivalent and better integrated into the play’s plot structure than Julie’s.

That Ibsen in The Master Builder borrowed the tower-climbing motif from Strindberg’s The Secret of the Guild is less important than the metaphysical nature of the adversarial relationship of husband and wife that Ibsen found in The Father. To Van Laan both The Master Builder and The Father are plays that “seek to transcend realism, to develop a kind of expressionism,” and the autobiographical elements in Ibsen’s last four plays may owe something to Strindberg’s plays in the late ‘80s. There are similarities between When We Dead Awaken (1899) and To Damascus (1898); Ibsen’s last play is “different in form from anything he had written before.” Van Laan’s two essays, like everything else he publishes, present critical substance in a shapely fashion. Even one’s disagreements with him are usually stimulating.

Errol Durbach disapproves of Ingmar Bergman’s ways of doing Ibsen in film and on stage and holds Strindberg responsible whenever Bergman imposes misogyny, materialism, and expressionism on Ibsen’s scripts. (4) As a result, the Norwegian’s moral and psychological ambiguities and clarity and purity of form (what Durbach calls his “open-ended realism”) have been distorted and reduced to the two Swedes’ ideology and idiosyncrasy.

Strindberg was notoriously afraid of being “impregnated” by other writers and exulted when he thought he found in Hedda Gabler evidence that his “seed” The Father and Creditors sprouted in Ibsen’s “uterus.” He felt that he had gotten his revenge on “the old troll.” Actually, Durbach argues, Hedda is not at all like Strindberg’s man-hating aggressors. She is sometimes petty, cruel, cowardly, manipulative, asexual, snobbish, and destructive, but there is a kind of redemption for her in her suicide because it declares her discovery that beauty, courage, and freedom are not attainable in a world of scholarly pedants, lascivious judges, drunken geniuses, and tiresome aunts. Hedda asserts her aristocratic values; in contrast, Miss Julie would be a disgraced aristocrat were she an aristocrat at all.

Durbach holds it against Bergman that his Ibsen productions have perversely proven Strindberg right. Bergman’s Nora was a manipulative and cruel Laura, a vampire triumphing over a ridiculous Torvald, naked in bed and sexually aroused, his defeat witnessed by their little daughter. And his Hedda was a little like Julie, a reduced heroine, helplessly victimized by physiology, her suicide as un-willed. Bergman’s Ibsen play ends in Hedda’s and not (as Durbach thinks it should) in society’s failure.

Durbach’s use of Strindberg’s irrational hostility to Ibsen as a means to attacking Bergman’s productions of Hedda Gabler (and of A Doll House) is a legitimate strategy: Bergman doing Ibsen invites controversy. And Durbach rightly calls attention to the dangers inherent in Bergman’s inventive liberties with the text and his strange practice of making cuts only in Ibsen’s concise scripts and not in the voluble Strindberg’s. But staging a play is not a matter of sacrilege. The premise for Durbach’s one-sided attack is that only by adhering to the theater conventions the playwright wrote under can a director do justice to the plays. That is a reasonable but not a sacred principle. It may, in fact, keep plays frozen in space and time, inviolate from what can be exciting experiments in interpretation, text editing, acting style, and design. Many unorthodox Ibsen productions are proofs. The authentic nineteenth-century Ibsen the theater purists want runs the risk of becoming, in a different age, an impoverished Ibsen. Ibsen contains multitudes. (A small correction: the Norwegian word uvillårlig translates into English not as Durbach’s instantaneous but as not deliberate, spontaneous.)

Steven Doloff neatly shows that Gretta Conroy in Joyce’s story “The Dead” in Dubliners may owe her “emotional anatomy” to Nora in A Doll House. (5) The two works have in common an ironic Christmas setting, the husband’s “reinfatuation” with his wife after a party, his learning something new about her—not, as in “The Dead,” a past lover, but her possession of “independent mental life.” Both husbands are jealous of their wife’s past, admire her physical beauty as she dances, want to save her from some unnamed danger, relish the thought of their “secret love life,” patronize her lack of maturity and good sense, and disapprove of her eating sweets. And in both play and story there are references to death and physical disintegration. Doloff concludes: Torvald Helmer, though less sympathetic than Gabriel Conroy, “nevertheless anticipates facets of Gabriel’s status-driven mentality, egotistical self-deception, pettiness, jealousy, and romantic objectification of his wife.” And in Ibsen’s play Joyce may have found analogues to his own married life.

Leonard Pronko’s reflections on Ibsen and Verdi and Kabuki theater “Trolls, Trills, and Tofu” (6) is one of those post-Artaudean calls for de-intellectualizing and thus reinvigorating modern theater that were more frequent (and necessary) some thirty or forty years ago than today. In Pronko’s dictionary, trolls stand for the supernatural and spiritual (!) and invisible (!); trills for “technical polish” and bravura; and tofu for something at once substantial, “real,” and nourishing. Ibsen provides the trolls, Verdi the trills, and Kabuki the tofu.

Pronko’s too-cute title does mean something. The trio can liberate us from our “Greco-Judeo-Christian” tradition of “Platonic idealism, Aristotelian realism, Judaic monotheism, Cartesian rationalism, and Newtonian mechanism”—to which we have now added “Einsteinean relativism.” Theater can and should be more than our arid and overexplicit psychological exhibitions and exegeses. Verdi was more than a musician; he set to music not just songs but situations. Kabuki is total theater, both Apollonian and Dionysiac, “actualizing” the actor’s voice, body, feelings, and intellect. And Ibsen even in his prose plays combined “mythopoeic infrastructure” and “realistic superstructure” in a “rich amalgam.” He, too, helps us “to keep our eyes on the stars and our feet on the ground.” Pronko’s final slogan epitomizes all that is at once passé and facile in his lively polemic.

The 1995 crop of articles includes two myth criticisms, both learned, articulate, suggestive, and very long. In the first, Kristi Boger and Inge Kristiansen discuss (in Norwegian) “The Morning Star and Autocratic Power” in an analysis of the “Lucifer/Venus Motif in . . . Catiline.” (7) Their detailed discourse has three theses: first, that Ibsen was right when he said, in 1875, that Catiline, like his subsequent plays, dealt with “the contradiction of ability and aspiration, will and possibility;” second, that the drama about Catiline’s rise and fall is also a drama about sin and redemption; and third, that the play is a muted allegory on the rise and fall of Rome, rendered through allusive analogues to pagan and Christian myth.

Concerning the first: the authors, like Ewbank, do not think that Ibsen was blind to his protagonist’s many faults. Critics have unfairly charged Ibsen either with ignorance of the consensus of historians ever since Catiline’s own time that Ibsen’s “hero” was a thoroughly unsavory sort, or else with defying, in absurd arrogance, established historical judgment. Ibsen’s 1875 Preface refutes those charges. But he could not, even in 1850, share Sallust’s and Cicero’s complete condemnation of Catiline, and he still believes, in 1875, that there must have been “something of considerable greatness” about a man whom Cicero, “the tireless advocate of the majority,” did not dare to confront before circumstances made it expedient to do so. Ibsen’s Catiline’s highest ambition is not to revolutionize republican Rome but to immortalize himself. On this point, too, Boger and Kristiansen are at one with Ewbank.

In both of his plays about ancient Rome, Ibsen dealt with the human aspiration/human limitation antinomy. The authors argue this in terms of the classical myths about Icarus and Venus (the “wandering” evening and morning star, and, as the mother of Aeneas, the ancestress of Rome) and stories about Lucifer (another “fallen star”). The name of Catiline’s wife, Aurelia, suggests Aurora, the goddess of dawn, and thus, by extension, Venus, the morning star. This turns Aurelia’s dying “redemption” of Catiline into an ambiguity: a character lexically linked to both Venus and Lucifer does not qualify as a Christian redeemer. But because the Virgin Mary’s role as redeemer is linked to the suspended redeemer roles enacted by Solveig at the end of Peer Gynt and by Makrina at the end of the second part of Emperor and Galilean, the last scene of Catiline is, like its counterparts in the two later plays, “open.”

I cannot mention here all the allusions and analogues and inferred linkages by which Boger and Kristiansen sustain their argument that Catiline anticipates, in theme (including Rome’s destiny), in the allusive use of pagan and Christian myth, and in imagery, much of the more sophisticated and complex Emperor and Galilean. Their general argument confirms once again that Ibsen was right in insisting on the coherence in sequence (sammenhængen) of his entire canon. But I did at times find their elaborations on the mythical correspondences tenuous, strained, and only remotely relevant to the immediate drama.

The second work on Ibsen and myth confines itself to tracing a mythological motif in a single play—Hedda Gabler as Ariadne. (8) It, too, is erudite and fluent, nimble in exegesis, often incisive in suggesting what the ingeniously discovered connections mean, and fond of the esoteric. My problem with the essay is both different from and more basic than my problem with Boger’s and Kristiansen’s: what is the tacit premise for this kind of inquiry? Surely it is not that Ibsen—to take the present case—was an expert on the ubiquitous Ariadne myth. He may have known more about pagan mythology than most educated Norwegian laymen of his time, but compared to Nichols’ his knowledge was as a third-grader’s compared to a professional mythographer’s. And thus Nichols’ assumption must be that myths embody universal archetypes and that their paradigms therefore are available to all creative imaginations, anywhere and at all times, even if the artists themselves are unaware of their individual share in the collective racial memory. This is a pretty but unprovable postulate. The closest Nichols comes to addressing my concern is in this sentence from her Introduction: “Indeed, it is now impossible for me to know, and may be immaterial, whether I induced Ariadne into or deduced her from the outlines of tragic heroines like Antigone, Phaedra, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and others [each the subject of a chapter in Nichols’ book] expressing Ariadne’s daring, her longings, her disordering and maenadic persona.” And that is not very close.

Nichols’ argument in her chapter on Ibsen is (in my drastically shortened paraphrase) that Hedda Gabler is a “satire on the death of tragic art,” that tragedy is rooted in myth, and that the mythical Ariadne—deserted by Theseus and married to Dionysos, “the god of women” and the lord of the art of theater—“charges the energies of a sacred world gone wrong.” In this paradigm, Hedda is a “perverse eiron,” whose suicide “redeems her maker and his art by negating the play’s sterility.” The play is “interplay between myth and naturalism”: Hedda is both General Gabler’s pregnant daughter and Ariadne (and also Athena), Tesman is both her dull scholar-husband and Theseus, Lövborg is both a recovered/relapsed drunk and a Dionysiac, Thea Elvsted is both a semi-hysterical little fool and Artemis. Nichols ends by quoting Professor Rubek’s grim amusement at the failure of his admiring public to discern the brutish physiognomies behind the lifelike “masks” of his portrait busts. In Hedda Gabler, as in When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen’s art was “double-faced.” This is deft, and fair enough. But somehow Nichols’ ever-ramifying, singleminded suggestiveness left me with a feeling of claustrophobia. I do not wish to argue with her main argument or with its feminist underpinnings. Her essay fascinates me, but I can neither believe nor disbelieve it. And I query some of its details. What Hedda, addressing Løvborg, calls her “worst act of cowardice” is not her loveless marriage to Tesman but her rejection of Løvborg’s sexual advances. In a stunning apotheosis in a brief passage on A Doll House at the end of her Ibsen chapter, Nichols gives us Krogstad as Dionysos. And neither in nor out of context can I make sense of this sentence: “A daughter as muse carries no ontological history in the economics of desire.”

Next are articles that treat what may be called “Ibsen and the Times.”

Errol Durbach explores a duality in Ibsen’s use of landscape. (9) More responsive to the Dresden school of landscape painting than to the older, “romantic,” less directly observant Dusseldorf school, Ibsen in his stage directions combined one variant of the Dresden aesthetic—Caspar David Friedrich’s reading “the hieroglyphic language of God” into nature—with another—the Norwegian J. C. Dahl’s landscapes of “fluctuating forms and turbulence.” Friedrich’s “mythic landscape, a world of permanent value,” is that of Ibsen’s last protagonists, Borkman and Rubek. Something like Dahl’s contrasting way of seeing nature appears in the wintry desolation of the final stage set of John Gabriel Borkman as it does as well in the avalanche that kills Irene and Rubek in When We Dead Awaken. That is, Ibsen stages the tension between Dahl’s world of “dynamic natural energy” and Friedrich’s vision of “ideal and imperishable forms” in the difference between the landscape shown and the landscape talked about by protagonists who are in the grip of “intense...spiritual yearning.” The world of Ibsen’s last two plays is at once earthy-real and sublime-symbolic. Perhaps, Durbach suggests, a third site (a “third empire”?) can be found, distant from both the impossible kingdom of death, where all longing petrifies and freezes, and the merely sensory and mundane and trivial. It may be the site Osvald Alving painted in his sun-drenched pictures, or what, more darkly, we see in the final tableau of John Gabriel Borkman with the two reconciled, shadowy sisters.

I found Durbach on Ibsen and landscape painting subtler and more convincing than on Ibsen-Strindberg-Bergman. This is an important and original essay.

In “The Paradox of Memory” (10), Oliver Gerland’s justification of psychoanalytical readings of Ibsen would be stronger if it were based on more than a single example. In the scene in act two of When We Dead Awaken in which Rubek describes for Irene the revised version of his sculpture, the two characters assume the physical position of the woman and the man as they appear in the altered statue. The scene is an instance of what Pierre Janet (1859-1947) called therapeutic reenactment of a traumatic experience. According to Janet, the healthy psyche stores all experience in memory—events, sensations, thoughts, feelings—and orders and unifies them. But traumatic experience sometimes escapes that process only to reenact it later in the subconscious. “The paradox of memory” is the patient’s denial of the fact of the trauma, while he/she relives the traumatic event in specific, often physical ways. Janet calls these two kinds of remembering narrative (recollected) and traumatic (reenacted). Therapy consists in helping the patient (Janet often used hypnosis) transfer traumatic into narrative memory. Gerland sees the scene in act two as such a transfer. Rubek’s “verbalization” of the confessional nature of what he has made of the original “Resurrection Day” makes public his traumatic, secret betrayal of love for the sake of art and thus becomes a means to redemption. The death of the lovers signifies both the power of the inescapable past and the redemption and liberation from their imprisonment in that past’s trauma. Like Durbach on Ibsen and schools of landscape painting, Gerland on Ibsen and early psychotherapeutic theory finds ambivalence in the play’s ending. We cannot be sure whether the past “possesses” (in the manner of psychosis) the present or whether the present “possesses” (in the sense of “overcomes”) the past.

One problem with this reading is that the scene on which Gerland’s argument depends is not followed by redemption/liberation/dispossession but by further recrimination and remorse. Still, Gerland’s article, though strictly speaking hardly literary-critical at all, can be useful to those who want to reconcile psychotherapeutic theory with what Gerland (citing Brian Johnston) calls Ibsen’s “dramatic-theatric structure.” It is not one of my urgent concerns.

The first sentence in Robert Gross’s article on Rosmersholm states his thesis: the crisis of the play is “a crisis of the Modern.” (11) The play is of the Enlightenment, but Ibsen presents emancipation from an obscurantist and oppressive past as crisis and not as process. Modernism defines itself as crisis.

The politics of Rosmersholm is vague. (It is?) Rosmer converts to liberalism in religious language. His guilt, past and present, pervades the play. “Innocence . . . is a fantasm, projected into the past.” Misdeeds and their punishment are obscurely linked. “Attributions of guilt dissolve into ambiguity, as the moral ontology of melodrama is undercut by the epistemological uncertainties of modernist art. Is the Rosmer way of life moral enlightenment or moral masochism?” Neither Rosmer nor Rebecca can answer. Their liebestod is both “morally exalted and desperately neurotic, and does not let the play resolve itself in favor of either interpretation.” The lovers are in transition from the “scrupulous traditions” that Rosmersholm stands for, to the “already happened” modern scene and its break with the past. But scrupulosity is a form of solipsism.

The millrace, significantly, is out of the audience’s view. The house represents a long patriarchal line, the millrace a woman’s death. It is yet another example of place as sublime, set “in contrast to the oppressive interior setting.” (Other examples: the mountain heights in Brand, Ghosts, and When We Dead Awaken, the open sea in The Lady from the Sea, the Dionysiac emblems in Hedda Gabler, the woods in The Wild Duck.) But this sited “sublime” in Rosmersholm is unique in its association with threatening engulfment and hence with “dread of sexuality.” There is a hint of lesbianism in Kroll’s description of Beata’s affection for Rebecca; their situation is that of two highly sexed women locked up in a house of “male impotence.” Gross concludes suggestively: Rosmersholm marks the end of faith in the Enlightenment and of faith in “the ability of men and women to become autonomous ethical subjects.” But he is not everywhere so lucid and weighty. I do not receive insights into Ibsen’s play or Rosmer’s psychology by being told that “the fantasy of the Father’s phallus . .. provides Johannes’ only defense against the image of castration in the millrace.” Gross’s deconstructionism seasoned with updated Freud yields a rich harvest, but his modernist allegiances make for long and hard sifting.

The case Verna Foster makes for calling The Wild Duck a tragicomedy is neither new nor any longer controversial, but she restates it correctly and concisely. (12) First, tragicomedy, “discomfortingly” poised between the ridiculous and the sublime and excluding philosophical closure, deals with metaphysical rather than social issues. Second, there is in tragicomedy no final redemption, as there is (however ambiguously) in Measure for Measure, which otherwise qualifies as one of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies (or “problem plays,” in the terminology of Shakespeare criticism). Ibsen’s play is therefore “bleaker” than Shakespeare’s. Third, tragicomedy is metatheatrical in allowing the audience points of view different from the characters’. As if Ibsen were writing early Verfremdung theater, “engagement and detachment are held in particularly fine balance in The Wild Duck.” In 1921, Shaw (in a piece on Tolstoy in The London Mercury) wrote that Ibsen had “established tragic comedy as a much deeper and grimmer entertainment than tragedy.” Foster takes this further: in “the modern drama tragicomedy takes the place of tragedy. Hamlet becomes Hjalmar and Cordelia is driven to Hedvig’s pointless suicide.” In virtually eliminating Hjalmar’s ridiculous rhetoric and Gina’s no-nonsense practicality, the Ullmann-Irons film became only “a beautifully acted and moving melodrama.”

The other article on Rosmersholm in 1995 belongs to theater history rather than to drama criticism. Bernard Dukore (13) calls up from the past Rosmer of Rosmersholm, a play by “Austin Fryers” (a pseudonym for Edward Cleary), which was performed in London in February of 1891 and was published, under the title Beata, later that year. There were twenty-two performances of Beata in the spring of 1892. The significance of the modest success of this forgotten curiosum, Dukore thinks, is that it appeared at a time when British audiences, critics, and theater managers had begun to recognize that Ibsen’s plays brought a new kind of realism to the stage—however abhorrent many of them found their content. That sounds right.

Fryers/Cleary wrote his play from the conviction that “the real drama of Rosmersholm occurred before Ibsen begins his play.” Beata and Dr. West are on-stage characters, the former the “good” wife who sacrifices herself so that her husband can marry the woman who is his soulmate and who carries—so Beata has been led to believe—his child. Rebecca is rather a “cold fish,” scheming and deceitful. At the end of Beata (but not of Rosmer of Rosmersholm), Rosmer kills himself. That takes care of Ibsen’s sequel.

Sara Jan’s assessment of William Archer’s Ibsen translations (14) is generally both acute and sensitive, though her remarks on specific passages do not always support her argument that we are being unfair to Archer when we dismiss his translations simply as “Victorian.” Archer was a liberal afraid of radicalism (political and cultural), an “idealist” in the Arnoldian mold. As a translator he was torn between a view of literary drama as “high thoughts in beautiful language” and the living stage voice. He was uneasy with Ibsen’s sexual innuendos and with his “mix of realism and metaphor.” Although his faithfulness to Ibsen’s original is sometimes clunkily literal, his translations are worth another look because they were standard in the Anglophone world from the 1890’s until about 1930 and are therefore “crucially important to an understanding of the playwright’s English reception in the 1890’s and the early part of the twentieth century.”

Otto Reinert
University of Washington

Review of (15): Otto Reinert, “Notes to Peer Gynt”:

This article follows the method of H. [Henri] Logeman’s massive, erudite, and indispensable Commentary of 1917 (A Commentary, Critical and Exploratory, on the Norwegian Text of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Its Language, Literary Associations and Folklore [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1917; reprinted Greenwood Press, 1970]). Reinert’s admirable “Notes,” usefully keyed to the Norwegian text in the Hundreåsutgaven [Centenary Edition] and to the Kirkup-Fry translation in The Oxford Ibsen, constitute a treasure-trove for every scholar, teacher, and seri6us reader of Peer Gynt and are a worthy successor indeed to Logeman’s great work of scholarship.

Reinert devotes ten pages to acts one through three, fourteen to the densely topical act four, and fifteen and a half to the textual riches of act five. His comprehensive, usefully cross-referenced notes identify and comment on 1) Norwegian geographical place names; 2) Ibsen’s multiple sources in Norwegian fairy-tales and folklore, the Bible, and the work of other writers; 3) the play’s numerous historical and contemporaneous allusions; 4) the major philosophical and religious ideas and systems represented in the text; 5) interesting etymological and linguistic issues, both those raised by the text as well as the more general matter of Ibsen’s blending of traditional and norsified Dano-Norwegian; 6) infelicitous or erroneous translations of the play in The Oxford Ibsen. If this list included everything that Reinert’s “Notes” accomplished, his article would already be accounted as immensely useful. But Reinert also offers a reading of the great text to which he has devoted his scholarship, providing analyses of key passages and pointing out important textual and thematic parallels (swiftly demolishing, into the bargain, some of the play’s more inane readings); the result is that at the end, the reader has not only been expertly guided through the topical, historical, philosophical and lexical byways of Peer Gynt by a fine scholar, but has been treated to a succinct, supple, and coherent reading of one of the richest poetic texts of the Western canon. Merging great learning with sure taste and uncommonly good sense, Reinert’s writing is delightful.

The only way to illustrate Reinert’s accomplishment is to quote from it. As an example of his scholarship, I cite part of one note, that on the “Huhu” of act four: “Ibsen’s satirical representation of the fanatical language reformers in Norway, who wanted to replace the Dano-Norwegian language. . . with Nynorsk. Nynorsk (“New-Norwegian”) is a reconstruction, based on living dialects.. by the self-taught philosopher Ivar Aasen (1813-96), on what Old Norse would have developed into if Norway had not been ruled by Denmark for so long.... More specifically, Huhu is probably meant to be a satire on Aasmund. Olavsson Vinje (1818-70), a Nynorsk poet and essayist: (and, in 1851, Ibsen’s co-editor of a liberal satirical weekly), who in 1866 had pretended that Brand’s uncompromising ethical rigor so obviously was lunacy that Ibsen could only have meant the whole play about him as a joke. Ibsen was furious. Although in vocabulary, idiom, and syntax the language of Ibsen’s own plays (and not just Peer Gynt) was markedly Norwegian and not conventional Dano-Norwegian, Huhu’s monologue represents Ibsen’s view of the Nynorsk movement as a willful return by nationalist extremists to barbarian inarticulateness. The quality of Nynorsk literature from the beginning has emphatically invalidated that judgment.” And as an example of the analytical finesse accompanying Reinert’s scholarship, I quote his last note, on Solveig’s famous “Sov og drøm du, Gutten min”: “Solveig’s affirmation of love is the play’s last speech. Do her words therefore silence the Buttonmoulder’s warning just before that the final judgment on Peer remains to be passed, and do they say that Peer’s self is saved? (The Oxford’s graceless and officious “home-returner” for “boy” seems to reflect that “happy” reading.) Solveig, however, is not an unbiased witness, and there may be sardonic irony in her urging the “boy” Peer to go on “sleeping” and “dreaming,” which is, one might say, what he has been doing all his life. Two Norwegian contemporaries, Björnstjerne Björnson (1832-1910) and Arne Garborg (1851-1924), have not been alone in finding the ending of Peer Gynt “unclear” and “unsatisfactory”. . . . Would they similarly fault Ibsen for not ending Ghosts with Mrs. Alving either giving or not giving Oswald the pills? Is it any less true to the text of Peer Gynt—and isn’t it, as in the case of Ghosts, more rewarding—to read the ending as ambiguous drama? Isn’t the non-resolution of Peer Gynt the only possible resolution of a play about modern Everyman?” The answer, of course, can only be “Yes.”

Reinert’s “Notes to Peer Gynt,” an invaluable contribution to studies of the play and one of the most important articles on Ibsen to appear in Scandinavian Studies, will prove invaluable to the editors of the new Norwegian Henrik Ibsens Skrifter.

1. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Rome: A Study in Cultural Transmission,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994),
229-42.

2. Thomas Van Laan, “Ibsen and Shakespeare,” Scandinavian Studies 67 (1995), 287-305.

3. Thomas Van Laan, “Ibsen and Strindberg: Interactions in the 1880s,”
Annals of Scholarship 9 (1992), 239-56.

4. Errol Durbach, “Ibsenian Uterus, Strindbergian Seed: Ingmar Bergman’s Hedda Gabler,” Essays in Theatre/Etudes Théâtrales 12 (1993), 41-49.

5. Steven Doloff, “Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and “The Dead,” James Joyce Quarterly 31 (1994), 111-13.

6. Leonard Pronko, “Trolls, Trills, and Tofu: Ibsen, Verdi, and Kabuki,”
Comparative Drama 29 (1995), 303-18.

7. Kristi Boger and Inge Kristiansen, “Morgenstjernen og menneskets herskermakt: en analyse av Lucifer/Venus-motivet i Henrik Ibsens Catilina” [“The Morning Star and Autocratic Power in an Analysis of the Lucifer/Venus Motif in Henrik Ibsens Catiline”], Edda 1995 (2), 111-26.

8. Nina da Vinci Nichols, “Ibsen’s Ironic Muse,” in Nichols’ Ariadne's Lives (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 114-25.

9. Errol Durbach, “The Romantic Possibilities of Scenery: Ibsen’s Mountain Kingdoms and the Dresden School of Landscape Art,” Annals of Scholarship 9 (1992), 279-92.

10. Oliver Gerland, “The Paradox of Memory: Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken and Fin de Siècle Psychotherapy,” Modern Drama 38 (1995), 450-61.

11. Robert Gross, “Rosmersholm: the Maelstrom of the Modern,”
Essays in Theatre/Etudes Théâtrales 13 (1995), 159-69.

12. Vera A. Foster, “Ibsen’s Tragicomedy: The Wild Duck,” Modern Drama 38 (1995), 287-97.

13. Bernard Dukore, “A Prequel to Rosmersholm,” Theatre History Studies 15 (1995), 27-39.

14. Sara Jan, “William Archer’s Translations of Ibsen, 1889-1900,” Scandinavica 34 (1995), 5-35.

15. Otto Reinert, “Notes to Peer Gynt,” Scandinavian Studies 67 (1995) 434-75.

ARTICLES ON IBSEN, 1996

Otto Reinert has concluded his long run (since 1986) of providing Ibsen News and Comment with informative, perceptive, and entertaining annual surveys of the critical literature on Ibsen in periodicals and essay collections, and the formidable task of trying to follow in his footsteps has fallen upon me. Like Otto, I shall be focusing primarily on material in English but also including some essays in other languages, especially Norwegian; unlike him, I shall be saying at least something about the essays he would have omitted as being unworthy of notice, if only to suggest why they might not be useful. The voice you hear will be different from the voice you have become used to. I hope that what you hear will not seem too inferior to what you used to hear.

Along with thirteen essays from 1996, this survey also covers two from 1994 that had not been listed earlier in the bibliographies Otto drew on and one from 1997 that responds to a 1996 essay. I take them up in the following order: essays making a general point about Ibsen, essays concerned with a general point but arguing it primarily from a single play, essays focused almost exclusively on a single play, and essays in which Ibsen is prominent but not the real focus.
The first category has only one entry, Bruce Maylath’s discussion of “the trouble with Ibsen’s names” (1). This trouble is the consequence of three factors: “Ibsen appears to have chosen or even invented many of his characters’ names in order to signal to his audiences something about the characters,” English translators tend not to translate names that convey meaning beyond the signifying of a particular identity, and “English speakers . . . now constitute Ibsen’s largest audience.” According to Maylath, this tendency of English translators is of long standing, going back to the earliest translations of the Bible, but in translation theory a minority view now urges translators to translate meaningful names and this view “appears to be gaining adherents.” Maylath demonstrates the validity of the problem he has defined by discussing several names of Ibsen characters: Falk and Svanhild from Love’s Comedy, Kaja Fosli and Solness from The Master Builder, Eyolf and the Rat Wife from Little Eyolf, the four international capitalists from the beginning of Act 4 of Peer Gynt, Løvborg from Hedda Gabler, and Dr. Rank from A Doll House (this last case points out the possible misconception English speakers might derive from the name as well as examining the meaningfulness of the name in Norwegian). Some aspects of Maylath’s consideration of these names were familiar to me, but most of it is so richly informative that I learned far more about the probable meanings of these names from this article than I had previously learned in more than thirty years of reading Ibsen criticism. Maylath concludes his essay by providing translators with three possible solutions to the problem he has defined: translate names that have direct English equivalents, where necessary “take more liberty and provide an equivalent,” and where no other choice exists use a footnote or give an explanation in an appendix.

The essays arguing a general point from a single play constitute the largest of my categories, and I initiate it with three essays by Erik Østerud. In “Myth and Modernity” (2), he sees Ibsen as having developed “the expressive capacity of naturalism to a level few playwrights since have approached” because he established a “double meaning” through the creation of a “double drama,” housing “a sacred drama, a drama of myth and ritual ceremonies,” within “a drama of modernity.” The drama of modernity examines the predicament of modern man as “cut off from the normative past with its fixed rules and criteria” and having “to create his own present—and his own future.” The sacred drama is the means by which “the faith and the moral values of sacred tradition” are kept alive and carried “from the past into the present situation.” “Both types of drama contribute to a widening of the theatre of naturalism, the sacred drama by linking the bourgeois parlor to cosmic space, the drama of modernity by putting the events of everyday life into a temporal perspective of historical existence.” The “ritual acts and magic” in Ibsen are to be found in such moments as Nora’s tarantella dance, Rebecca’s and Rosmer’s “wedding celebration carried out as a common suicide,” Hedda Gabler’s “symbolic burning of the child” and her “attempt to stage the vine-leave dream,” “the Master Builder’s ritual climbing to the top of the tower to argue with God,” and “Irene’s and Rubek’s apocalyptic ascent to the top of the mountain.” To develop his claims, Østerud glances briefly at Ghosts and A Doll House and then provides a lengthy analysis of When We Dead Awaken. This analysis has considerable merit and is well worth consulting, but for me the essay has two major problems. The first is the vagueness of the discussion of the “sacred drama,” which is much too brief to dispel the various difficulties arising from the idea of literature’s somehow involving us in myth and ritual celebrations or to explain just what Østerud has in mind when he refers to the “sacred drama”—although it almost sounds as if he imagines that celebrations like those described by Frazer in The Golden Bough are still being practiced. The other problem is that the analysis of When We Dead Awaken constantly introduces passages—such as a long comparison of Ibsen’s “Ur Szene” in the play with the Freudian one—which are apparently meant to give the discussion theoretical resonance but strike me as digressions that are unnecessary to the argument and that considerably lessen its clarity.

It is not easy to get a firm grasp on the next two of Østerud’s essays, but both of them are centrally concerned with the “visuality” of Ibsen’s last twelve plays, by which he means not only the richness of the plays’ visual fields but more importantly the characters’ preoccupation with getting themselves and what matters to them viewed by others in a particular way or, conversely, refusing to cooperate with the views projected by others. In “Henrik Ibsen’s Theatre Mask” (3), in a good discussion of the nature of photography in Ibsen’s day he notes that the amount of time needed for exposure made the photograph an occasion for extracting “a pose from ‘the stream of real life’ ” that would “summarize one’s whole identity.” He then shows that Werle, with his party in the opening act of The Wild Duck, is “producing a picture of himself,” of “the merchant in happy union with his family,” and follows this up with a careful tracing of several plays-within-the-play staged by the characters, also producing pictures of themselves, and with the analysis of several incidents in which characters are in conflict about exactly what is being viewed. In “Tableau and Thanatos in Henrik Ibsen’s Gengangere” (4), he focuses on how, from the moment Osvald enters the play, Mrs. Alving seeks “to bring him into a visual field of meaning” in which the relation between them is one of “a close reciprocal love and care.” However, other elements “emerge in the visual field” that disrupt “her view of the world,” and the picture with which the play ends is a Pietà. Østerud’s concern with the “visuality” of Ibsen’s plays has a second major dimension, which is evident in both essays but much more fully developed in the second of them. Here he draws on Michael Fried’s work on Diderot to argue that Ibsen’s later plays are not Aristotelean in nature but instead correspond to Diderot’s conception of drama as tableau. In the essay on The Wild Duck, he states: “The Ibsenesque protagonist …fanatically nurtures visual ambiguities which allow instincts, desires and energies to be kept at bay in the realm of fantasy and visual imagination. This paves the way for pure orgies of voyeurism and exhibitionism on the Ibsenesque stage, for acts of looking and showing, while real dramatic actions do not take place.” In the article on Ghosts, which much more explicitly develops the idea that Ibsen’s plays are Diderotean, he describes Diderot’s “notion of the perfect play [as] a succession of tableaux, that is, a gallery, or an exhibition where the audience moves from one picture to another.”

Reviewing the Norwegian version of the article on The Wild Duck in INC 16, Otto Reinert praised it for bringing “new angles of vision (literally) on the modality of Ibsen’s dramatic art and [sharpening] our understanding of the inner workings of his domestic moralities and of their relationship to theories of stage perception and to cultural history.” I essentially agree with this judgment and highly recommend the specific analyses of the play. On the other hand, I think the theoretical framework needs some reworking in the way of clarifying and distinguishing the different varieties of “visuality” and determining exactly how they interrelate. Moreover, a term like “visual dialogue,” which is what Østerud calls the results of the instances of “visuality,” strikes me as another attempt to create an aura of theory that is both unnecessary and more conducive to harm than good. I find a great deal of this kind of inappropriate dressing up of the argument in the essay on Ghosts as well. In 1997, Joan Templeton responded to the essay on Ghosts (5) in order to object to Østerud’s dismissal of the idea that the play is Aristotelean, correct some misleading characterizations of her own work on it, demonstrate the central importance of tableaux to Greek tragedy, and declare that Ghosts “does not lack a structure invented by the Greek tragedians.” I agree wholeheartedly with this last point, since for me one of the greatest aspects of Ghosts as well as Ibsen’s other plays is the carefully wrought movement of the action toward an ending that arises from it, and I believe that not to see this is to miss a good deal of what an Ibsen play is about. This is not to deny the tableaux Østerud has described; I agree with Templeton that with regard to the Aristotelean vs. Diderotean conceptions of drama “it would have been better to argue that Ghosts is both/and rather than either/or.” In connection with this dispute, I find it interesting that Østerud’s own essays, especially these two, tend to be organized as a series of tableaux rather than as an argument moving steadily forward.

Brian Johnston’s essay on The Wild Duck (6) is his latest version of a reading of the play that he first expressed in print in 1966 (7). His conception of an Ibsen play is similar to Østerud’s “double drama” theory in “Myth and Modernity,” but his theoretical presentation of it is much more sophisticated. This is the idea of “text and supertext” that he made familiar in his 1989 book of that name. “Text” refers to the “language of everyday life” that records the play’s realistic dimension, while “supertext” conveys the “compelling levels of dramatic metaphor, verbal and visual,” that associates the realistic dimension to the entire history of western culture. “A struggle takes place between text and supertext for the play’s dominant language;” Johnston writes, “and it is the struggle itself, the way in which the spirit invades and infuses a despiritualized everyday reality that constitutes the major conflict of the play.” The supertext of The Wild Duck, which Johnston recapitulates for the reader early in the essay, is a kind of parody of the basic Christian action with Gregers misplaying the role of the Savior and thus bringing about disaster. The basic purpose of this latest version of Johnston’s reading is to highlight some instances of what Ibsen, writing to Georg Brandes about the play, called “diverse galskaber” (which Johnston translates as “a variety of wild ideas”). These are “the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Duck” (based on the verbal similarity of “and” [duck] and “aand" [spirit]); the “kvakksalver” that Relling derisively directs at the “quack” Gregers but that can also be understood as “savior of ducks or souls”; and the “diabolical behavior” down below that Hjalmar accuses Relling of. I think that Johnston tends to define the plays’ supertexts more fully than is warranted, but I also believe that his method of reading Ibsen is a good one for getting at the full complexity of an Ibsen play. Johnston has been criticized, especially by Norwegians, for making a pun of “and” and “aand” (because the opening vowels are different), but I have found enough similar things in Ibsen to believe that Johnston is entirely justified. (My favorite occurs in the first part of Emperor and Galilean, when Julian has induced his army to proclaim him emperor; his response is “Hærens vijje skje!” [“The army’s will be done”], which surely plays on “Herrens vilje skje!” [“The lord’s will be done”]). I must say, however, that Johnston takes up an inordinate amount of space to present the play’s “galskaber,” for this section of the essay runs to twenty pages, of which fifteen consist of long passages from the play.

The Rotenbergs’ discussion of idealization and disillusionment in Ibsen (8) defines these themes as they “have been represented in psychoanalytic thought,” situates Ibsen within modernism since his characters “are caught between the hope for limitless individualism yet are subject to hostile forces in the milieu that render impossible the ideal life they seek,” and suggests that the characters should be seen both as “parallels to actual people [Ibsen] knew” and “as externalized representations of conflicts within Ibsen.” Their analysis of The Wild Duck, which they see as especially exemplifying these recurrent themes in Ibsen’s work, largely consists of tracing, for most of the characters, “the contradictory forces in their characters tending toward idealization and disillusionment.” This is done in rather general terms that tend to eliminate much of the specificity of the characters, making them all rather similar as well as similar to characters in other Ibsen plays. I was amazed by the lack of awareness of any ambiguity or complexity in the play. For the Rotenbergs everything is clear-cut and definite; they know, for example, that Hedvig committed suicide, and they know why she did. Toward the end of the essay they provide a “psychobiographic discussion of Ibsen.” Their primary source for this is the unfinished memoir that Ibsen wrote in 1881, and with very little basis they decide that “the primary caretaking object for Henrik Ibsen was not the mother but the nursemaid,” and that this situation produced a “dialectic” in which the mother reasserted her authority, thus creating the “matrix that substantiated Ibsen’s view of the impermanence of love, the fragility of ideals.” They read the memoir as free association providing revelations to the trained analyst and show no signs of noticing Ibsen’s own very obvious deliberate manipulating of symbols in the text.

Oliver Gerland’s interesting and persuasive essay on Max Weber and John Gabriel Borkman (9) describes how Weber’s experience of Ibsen’s play helped release him from five years of “psychological and physical collapse” between 1898 and 1903. Using a line from the play—"An Icy hand has set me loose"—Weber, in some letters to his wife, “draws strong distinctions…between an old self obsessed with work and a new self that seeks tender love, between an old self afflicted with the diseased need to labor in the lonely academic trenches and a new self that aims to make his wife happy.” Gerland shows how these distinc-tions reflect important themes in Ibsen’s play and notes that the new self Weber describes most pertains to Erhart, Borkman’s son, but that Weber clearly identifies with Borkman. There is no way of telling whether the play also influenced Weber’s subsequent work, Gerland writes, because the similarities between Weber and Ibsen could be accounted for by “their shared cultural situation.” Nevertheless, in discussing Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” Gerland finds in Weber’s work two valuable grids for understanding Borkman: the notion that the idea of the “calling,” “stripped of spiritual meaning…fuels the engines of capitalism and furthers the process of alienation,” and the notion that, as the “charismatic leader’s ‘gift of grace,’ [the calling] explodes all conventions of rational economic behavior and so frees the individual from an impersonal modernity.” Gerland well justifies his claim that Weber’s work offers “a powerful theoretical position from which to examine” the idea of the calling that is such an important concept in Ibsen’s plays.

The psychology of Peer Gynt is the subject of Gerland’s other 1996 essay (10). Seeking a psychological model for understanding the play, Gerland rejects the Freudian model and Lacan’s modification of it because they “treat the psyche as a closed system designed to absorb, circulate and discharge instinctual energy” (Peer’s own conception of “the Gyntian self” fits this model). He turns instead to the work of “relational psychologists like Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut,” who perceive the self “as being shaped by and inevitably embedded within a matrix of relationships with other people.” Gerland defines and explains this model in detail and then applies it to the play’s characters, and, in a brief but very important passage, to its structure. The appli-cation sometimes reads like a translation of the play into a different set of terms, but for the most part the model works very well to bring out and place in a clear focus the way the characters interact and thus offers a coherent framework for understanding important moments of the action such as Peer’s return to Solveig. The detailed analysis of the play is well worth consulting. So is the ending of the essay, in which Gerland thoughtfully relates current relational psychology to Greek philosophy and tragedy. One of the most striking effects of this connection for me was its putting in a new light Aristotle’s insistence on the importance of family and other loved ones in tragedy.

Anne-Marie V. Stanton-Ife’s essay (11) bases its reading of The Lady from the Sea on the theoretical work of Luce Irigiray. Stanton-Ife objects to “metaphysical readings of plays which explore the social reality of women” because they “perform the same operations of silencing on the plays as the patriarchal structures on the women in them” and because they “undermine the central tension on which these plays are predicated: that women’s relationship to absolute values such as ‘freedom’ is necessarily even more relative and tenuous then men’s, for the simple reason that women are denied any accession to selfhood or any status as responsible ethical agents.” Instead of examining these plays in terms of “the Socratic question of how we should live,” she concludes, it would be much better to examine them in terms of “the more pressing Irigarayan question of where women should live within the patriarchal structures that constitute society—a society in which women are ‘homeless.”’ In her analysis of the play, which she sees as being “about places and spaces, more precisely, female places and spaces,” she shows that the “place” Wangel has put Ellida into corresponds to Irigaray’s “place of the maternal-feminine,” which patriarchy has constructed to prevent abandonment of the male and which in the process deprives woman of having valid identity. This is a “place” that Ellida “neither could nor would occupy, but being the only one available to her in the symbolic, she is left to construct an uncertain identity in its margins.” Wangel’s act of ultimately setting her free and focusing on her responsibility provides an “unprecedented representation of her as subject and agent” and “changes everything for [her]. It is the first time that any self to which she is responsible has been granted to her.” Stanton-Ife’s analysis of the play is developed through intricate close reading—as when she shows that the other characters have great difficulty in referring to Ellida and relates this to her having “no apparent place in the scheme of things—and examination of Ibsen’s “manipulation of the scenic space.” Still drawing on Irigary, she provides a good basis for seeing Ellida’s choosing Wangel as a positive act when she insists on the play’s importance in reestablishing love as a moral concept. This is an excellent, indispensable essay and my favorite of the essays surveyed in this report.

The next two items vaguely invoke a general point or refer to aspects of Ibsen’s work in general, but essentially the focus of each is a single play. In “Page, Stage and Screen” (12), Egil Törnqvist examines seven versions of the “opening” of Ghosts (the initial stage directions and the first five speeches between Regina and Engstrand): Michael Meyer’s translation of the play and six television productions of it, “three of which are moderately adjusted stage versions.” The sources and dates of the productions are Norway 1978, Denmark 1978, West Germany 1985, Britain 1986, West Germany 1987, and Sweden 1988. Törnqvist does a close reading of the text and for the productions offers a description with explanatory commentary, some interpretation, some comparison of one production with another, some criticism of directorial choices, and occasional generalizations derived from a particular detail. Some of the results are good, some obvious, some dubious. The essay as a whole is an exercise rather than an argument, although at the end Törnqvist tries to construct one by writing about the value of establishing “a clear picture of similarities and differences between” the three media he is concerned with and about examining the impact of the medium itself on a work. At least one of the few generalizations he makes during his readings does not augur well for successful fulfillment of these aims: “Zinger’s production is in every respect highly stylized: bare stage, monochrome costuming, emblematic gestures, loud voices. This creates problems when it comes to TV. Stylization works better on the stage than on the screen, which calls for intimacy, realism.”

In his study of Ghosts (13), Harold C. Knutson focuses almost exclusively on forms of address: names, pronouns, titles, epithets, and the like. Knutson opens with some run-of-the-mill generalizations about forms of address, but when he turns to examining specific aspects of the play—the relationship between Regine and Engstrand, the relationship between Mrs. Alving and Manders, Manders’ basic nature, Regine’s “du” to Osvald at the end of Act One, and Osvald’s use of “mor” (“mother”) unaccompanied by adjectives—he strikes pure gold. His remarks bring new light to the play and bring us closer to fully perceiving Ibsen’s artistry. Those preparing a production of the play would also do well to consult this essay.

The last four items all discuss Ibsen in connection with other concerns. By far the most important of them for Ibsen studies is Penny Parfan’s essay on Elizabeth Robins (14). This well researched account of Robins’ “early feminist critique of Ibsen” is based on Robins’ own writings, public and private, and is essentially a tale of two decades. In the 1890s, Robins made herself one of Ibsen’s staunchest champions in England by acting in seven Ibsen plays and producing all but two of these. Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, “horrified” her, however: “the Master hand had weakened, the Master voice was failing,” she later wrote. She ended her acting career after two more commercial stage ventures, and in 1906, looking for something to write a play about, got involved with the Suffragettes and soon became a dedicated feminist. Votes for Women, her play from 1907, draws on An Enemy of the People but deliberately revises what it takes in order to make it more in keeping with her feminist ideas. In her public lecture on “Some Aspects of Henrik Ibsen” the following year, her implicit critique of him became an explicit one. Here, as part of a lengthy survey of Ibsen’s “limitations” (such as his “glorification of the individual will”), she dismisses “the notion that his ‘profound understanding of women’ earned him the right to be considered as a thinker.” She states that in his later plays he did more than any other writer of the age to “familiarize the world ‘with the fact that woman’s soul no less than her brother’s is the battleground of good and evil’ ” and “ ‘to disembarrass women from the ignoble shackles of sentimentalism,’ ” but she then adds that he was “far from realizing what is called the feminist point of view.” She develops this assertion by, among other things, noting that “of all his characters only Nora...openly condemns and rejects the way she has been treated by her husband and the way women are treated in society at large” and by indicating several changes that Ibsen should have made in his plays. There is little to find fault with in this excellent essay, although I think Parfan’s interpretation of Robins’ reaction to When We Dead Awaken may be mistaken. To me what Robins says about the play sounds very much like what William Archer and other English admirers of Ibsen were saying about it. But Parfan quotes Adrienne Rich’s summary of what the play is about (“the use that the male artist and thinker—in the process of creating culture as we know it—has made of women, in his life and in his work; and about a woman’s slow struggling awakening to the use to which her life has been put”) and then suggests that Robins may well have been reacting to the play’s content and thus displaying an early sign of her subsequent commitment to feminism.

The last three items in this category require only brief notice. Marilyn Jurich’s “Solus Solo” (15) is on the subject of solipsism and consists of describing the character traits of Peer Gynt, John Gardner’s Grendel, and the protagonist of the novel Perfume. The remarks on Peer contain clumsy errors in transcriptions of quotations and in the spelling of unfamiliar words. The few judgments concern-ing Peer are drawn from others. No one interested in learning something about or developing a deeper sense of Peer Gynt will profit from reading this essay. For the last two items I here provide all that is specifically relevant to Ibsen in them.

In “Under the Sign of the Onion” (16), Rustom Bharucha uses his experience of directing an adaptation of Peer Gynt into one of the many languages of India to discuss the “intracultural negotiations” of his subtitle, but two of his remarks on the play are worth noting. He sees it as “nothing less than a saga of the secular self. Caught between forces of intolerance, fundamentalism, bigotry, and the giddy, irresponsible adventures of global capitalism, the play narrativizes a certain loss of the self, for which (in my interpretation, at least) there is no easy redemption.” Bharucha also observes that “basically—and I trust that my perspective will not be interpreted as cultural chauvinism—I am convinced that the ‘folk’ and epic dimensions of Peer Gynt are largely lost in western adapta-tions, for the critical (and historical) reason that there is no meaningful exposure of the ‘folk’ resources in these cultures, except through the most contrived reconstructions.” Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist, reviewed plays for five years in his twenties, among them a 1917 production of A Doll House (17). Gramsci calls the play a “superior creation of Ibsen’s imagination” that presents Nora’s “deeply moral action of leaving home, husband, and children to find herself, scrutinize her inner depths for the roots of her own moral being, and fulfill the duty we all have to ourselves, before others.” He also notes the play’s “vivid representation of human individuals in suffering and joy, struggling continually to better themselves and improve the moral fibre of their own personalities, both historically and in the world of the present.” But most of his review is devoted to an analysis of why the spectators could not sympathize with Nora’s final action but were instead “stunned and almost disgusted.” The cause of this, he argues, was that they had fully subscribed to the bourgeois moral code against which Nora rebels in order to adopt “a more spiritually human morality.”

1. Bruce Maylath, “The Trouble with Ibsen’s Names,” Names 44:1 (1996), 41-58.

2. Erik Østerud, “Myth and Modernity: Henrik Ibsen’s Double-Drama,” Scandinavica 33:2 (1994), 161-82.

3. Erik Østerud, “Henrik Ibsen’s Theatre Mask. Tableau, Absorption and Theatricality in The Wild Duck,” Orbis Litterarum 51 (1996), 148-77.

4. Erik Østerud, “Tableau and Thanatos in Henrik Ibsen’s Gengangere,” Scandinavian Studies 68 (1996), 473-89.

5. Joan Templeton, “Diderot’s Tableau, Greek Tragic Form, and Gengangere,” Scandinavian Studies 69 (1997), 346-49.

6. Brian Johnston, “‘Diverse Galskaber’ in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, ” Comparative Drama 30:1 (1996), 41-71.

7. Brian Johnston, “The Metaphoric Structure of The Wild Duck,” in Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen 1 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1966), 72-95.

8. Carl T. Rotenberg and Francene Rotenberg, “Idealization and Disillusionment in the Dramas of Henrik Ibsen,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 24 (1996), 137-61.

9. Oliver Gerland, “‘An Icy Hand Has Set Me Loose’: Max Weber Reads Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 11:1 (1996), 3-18.

10. Oliver Gerland, “Psychological Models for Drama: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Relational Self,” Mosaic 29:2 (1996), 53-72.

11. Anne-Marie V. Stanton-Ife, “A Woman’s Place/Female Space in Ibsen’s Fruen fra Havet” Scandinavica 35:1 (1996), 29-52.

12. Egil Törnqvist, “Page, Stage and Screen: The Opening of Ibsen’s Gengangere,” Tydschrift voor Skandinaviteek 17:1 (1996), 27-52.

13. Harold C. Knutson, “Forms of Address in Ibsen’s Ghosts,” Scandinavica 33:2 (1994), 147-60.

14. Penny Parfan, “From Hedda Gabler to Votes for Women: Elizabeth Robins’s Early Feminist Critique of Ibsen,” Theatre Journal 48 (1996), 59-78.

15. Marilyn Jurich, “‘Solus Solo’: The Monster Self: Solipsism in Peer Gynt, Grendel, and Perfume,” Paradoxa 2:1 (1996), 84-108.

16. Rustom Bharucha, “Under the Sign of the Onion: Intracultural Negotiations in Theatre,” New Theatre Quarterly 12 (1996), 116-29.

17. Antonio Gramsci, “Morality and Moral Codes: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Carignano,” a review published 23 March, 1917, and included in “Gramsci on Theatre,” introduced and translated by Tony Mitchell, New Theatre Quarterly 12 (1996), 259-65.

Thomas Van Laan
Rutgers University

ARTICLES ON IBSEN, 1997

The average number of essay-length commentaries on Ibsen published annually jumped considerably in 1997. I had slightly fewer than twenty to report on for 1996, while for 1997 there are more than fifty. Equally remarkable, most of them are also very high in quality. Since there are so many, I will treat them as succinctly as possible, but even then limitations of space necessitate postponing coverage of several 1997 essays until next year. Most of the 1997 essays appeared in collections or in special issues of periodicals devoted in whole or in large part to Ibsen. I will begin with the essays that appeared individually and then turn to the collections and special issues.

Ross Shideler’s two 1997 articles concern Ibsen’s dramatization of both the destructiveness of patriarchal society and its ongoing breakdown. The first of them (1) cites Darwin’s weakening of the authority of patriarchy and then reads Pillars of Society as a clash between “two opposing ‘families’ of humanity,” the traditional Christian one headed by Bernick and the one headed by Lona Hessel that “seems to represent a more biologically realistic or Darwinian world view.” Shideler implies that Darwin created the context within which Ibsen could develop his social critique, but his explicit attempts to define Ibsen’s relation to Darwin remain vague. His reading of the play is in effect not a new one but rather a recasting of the familiar reading into new terms, thereby providing a contribution to the (as yet only sketchily developed) understanding of Ibsen’s work in relation to its times. Shideler’s other article (2) makes a similar contribution while also richly opening up various aspects of the texts it discusses. The focus here is the preoccupation in Pillars of Society, A Doll House, and Ghosts with “the name of the father,” both literally (in such details as Bernick’s name in lights, Nora’s forgery of her father’s name, and Mrs. Alving’s building the orphanage in her husband’s name) and figuratively in Lacan’s use of the term to signify “the patriarch’s authority.” The article makes good use of Lacan’s theories in developing its points.

Joan Templeton’s “New Light on the Bardach Diary” (3) is an important study of the discrepancies in and general unreliability of the information that Emilie Bardach supplied on her much-discussed relationship with Ibsen. Comparing the two main publications in which Bardach took part—Basil King’s two-part article in The Century Magazine in 1923 and Andre Rouveyre’s article in Mercure de France in 1928, “Le Mémorial Inédit d’une Amie d’Ibsen,” written by Bardach at Rouveyre’s request—Templeton demonstrates that the second of these “contains material in such direct conflict with the King narrative that it casts serious doubt on the authenticity of both documents.” Templeton has also discovered, and published here for the first time, the MSS of Bardach’s eight letters to Rouveyre, in both their original French and her own English translations. She shows how these letters “establish beyond doubt Bardach’s unreliability as a memoirist” and prove the unreliability of another document that was claimed to be an account of Ibsen-Bardach relationship unmediated by retelling or by time: Hans Lampl’s publication in 1977 of what he presented as Bardach’s “diary.” Templeton shows that the “diary” was actually a copy of a typescript that Bardach sent to Rouveyre, containing selections from a Gossensass diary that she had “dictated to a secretary…about thirty-five years after the summer of 1889” with handwritten additions also ostensibly from the diary. In passing, Templeton also exposes the inaccuracies concerning Bardach perpetrated by Robert Ferguson in his 1996 biography of Ibsen. This is an authoritative treatment of a subject that has usually inspired wish-fulfillment fictionalizing.

Errol Durbach’s valuable and fascinating account of Ibsen and Viennese psychiatry (4) concerns how Otto Rank and Freud made Ibsen “an ally (sometimes, perhaps inadvertently, unacknowledged) in the search for a secular language to address…the unconscious life of the psyche.” The texts he consults are Freud’s reference to Little Eyolf in connection with the Rat Man (a reference that was crucial to Freud’s breakthrough in establishing a diagnosis), Rank’s discussions of Little Eyolf and Rosmersholm, and, most importantly, Freud’s consideration of Rebecca West. In connection with this text Durbach is most concerned with the “omissions in his argument,” which have to do with Freud’s not pursuing his examination of Rebekka far enough to realize that Rosmersholm is “Ibsen’s early gloss on” Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud’s discussion of Rosmersholm is disappointing because he “delimits” his reading of it to “Rebecca’s Oedipal tragedy,” Durbach notes. “But,” he continues, “a Freudian reading” of the play need not be delimiting, “if by Freudian one concedes the profoundly dialectical structure of his thought and its infinity with Ibsen’s own tragic vision of experience.” Durbach then proves his claim with a stunning reading of Rebecca’s tragedy that simultaneously illuminates both Ibsen’s play and Freud’s thought.

William Mishler has, so far as I know, contributed the first article-length essay on Ibsen to an on-line journal (5). His essay appears in a special issue of Anthropoetics devoted to religion, and its purpose, he writes, is to bring Brand as a religious tragedy “into a kind of dialog with Generative Anthropology—with the hope of contrasting their views regarding some of the implications that flow from the double nature of the human sign. I find that GA helps clarify the radically anthropological nature of Ibsen’s drama, just as I also find that the anthropological Ibsen poses certain fundamental questions to GA.” Mishler’s essential focus is on the play’s tragic nature, and what he has to say is important—although one needs to be familiar with the concepts of Generative Anthropology to fully appreciate it. This is not true, however, of the middle of the essay, in which Mishler provides the best explanation I have seen of Ibsen’s claiming that the form for the play suddenly came to him during a chance visit to St. Peters. What happened, according to Mishler, is that Ibsen realized he could best accomplish what he wanted to do in the play by casting it “in the form of a Mass.” Mishler’s demonstration of this in the play and consideration of the implications of its having been done are highly illuminating.

Lorelei Lingard’s consideration of Hedda Gabler (6) has some interesting work tracing the moments in which Hedda’s pistols play a part, but otherwise it does not probe very deeply, it distorts the play at times, it is very repetitious, and it is ultimately contradictory. Lingard chides Hedda for futilely seeking “the power of masculinity” while thwarting “any possibility for real power that her situation might afford her through her sexuality or her status as at mother,” an idea that is repeated five or six times in slightly altered language without ever being clarified. Toward the end, however, Lingard places the blame for what happens on “the position of women in turn-of-the-century society.”

The next several items appeared in Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen Vol. IX (7), which is surely the best volume in this series and certainly vastly superior to the publication that succeeded it, Ibsen Studies, the first issue of which, published in 2000, is mostly very weak material badly edited. The 1997 Contemporary Approaches, because of the strength of its many first-rate essays, especially those by Durbach, Paul, Ewbank, Stanton-Ife, and Johansen, is well worth owning.

Errol Durbach’s essay, which opens the volume (8), presents “an image of Ibsen as the modernist poet of Nothingness.” Starting with the scene of Peer Gynt’s peeling an onion in search of the core that isn’t there, Durbach not only provides a superb reading of Peer Gynt but also relates Peer’s discovery of nothingness to Ibsen’s later plays and, more importantly, to literary modernism as a whole. Durbach sees the play “as a great ironic analysis of positivist philosophies of Selfhood that, like Büchner’s God and Kierkegaard’s existence, have come to naught,” so that its hero must ultimately confront the question of what, in truth, it is to “be yourself,” and while the play does not unequivocally answer this question it at least sketches out some possible answers. In his wide-ranging, well-informed consideration of literary modernism, Durbach persuasively shows that Peer’s question is the “overwhelmingly Modernist question” and that Ibsen’s dramatization of it in Peer Gynt probably gave it that status.

Fritz Paul’s essay (9) notes Ibsen’s emphasizing the enclosedness of the dramatic space in his earliest dramas of contemporary life, thereby making “confinement a central theme of modern drama,” and his quickly switching to opposing “the outer world to the suffocating confinement of the parlor,” in the process initiating “the metaphorization of space as one of the most important innovations of modern theater.” But Paul is most concerned with the later plays, especially the last two, in which the landscapes most fully become metaphysical, and in which—to give an example of Paul’s reading at its best the “anthropological, theological, symbolic-representational dimension of the basic motif of climbing and reaching a peak has…changed its original optimistic-emancipating significance, dominant in sentimental and romantic poetry, by means of a quasi-negative dialectic into its opposite. The motif, which has become pure symbol, can now express only the deep pessimism of modern man, who is aware of his existential crisis and goes to ruin in a kind of senseless heroic optimism, in the belief of the accessibility of tower and peak (the perspective of the dramatis personae), but is actually irredeemable (the perspective of the drama itself), lost from the beginning, and he finally goes to ruin physically, that is, he can now find ‘salvation’ only in death.”

Inga-Stina Ewbank has taken the concept of “spiritual property” in her title (10) from Ibsen’s Preface to The Feast at Solhaug: “That which makes a work of art the spiritual property of its originator is that he has imprinted on it the stamp of his own personality.” Noting that it is possible to see “intertextuality, particularly Ibsenite forms of intertextuality” as essential to this “stamp of his own personality,” Ewbank goes on to explore three types of intertextuality in Ibsen: “within Ibsen’s plays, between different Ibsen plays, and between texts by Ibsen and texts by others.” The intertextuality within Ibsen’s plays consists of the echoings and repetitions which hold their structures together: his “plays are singularly given to conversation which continually refers back to itself, repeats words, images and phrases”; the “effect is that of each play creating, as it were, a linguistic world of its own.” The intertextuality between Ibsen’s plays relates most importantly to Ibsen’s wanting his readers to read all of his plays in order and to his preserving his notes and drafts so carefully “It would seem,” Ewbank writes, “that there is, to Ibsen, a particularly intimate connection between himself and his texts. Not that they are autobiographical in the sense of being ‘about’ his own life, but that, just as he wanted to be read through the ‘continuous whole’ of his texts, so he could only write himself through these texts.” The discussions of these first two types of intertextuality are loaded with important observations and perceptions, and the discussion of the third type, “the presence of other texts in Ibsen’s, to be recognized by echo, allusion, quotation,” is a densely and subtly developed meditation on influence, in both art and life, Ibsen’s own attitudes toward it, and on “spiritual property” itself. Ewbank, who has taught us more than anyone else about Ibsen’s use of language, here makes another valuable contribution to that topic.

Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife explores Solness’ preoccupation with lykke (luck/success/happiness) through the lenses of Kierkegaard and Greek tragedy (11). Solness is comparable to Kierkegaard’s figure of one who “rebels against the ideal (God)”: “he is in despair and not himself, for selfhood consists in ‘standing before God with a conception of God.”’ Solness thus experiences spiritual paralysis and seeks sanctuary from it by seizing upon the concept of lykke, “which, paradoxically, provides the main structure for his subterfuge, while at the same time exposing it for what it is.” Stanton-Ife undertakes a thorough examination of Solness’ uses of the concept, pointing out, among other things, how Solness builds “a mendacious mythology” around contingency, which is a central notion of tragedy since it is “the natural enemy of human control,” how he collapses “the ancient and enduring identification of luck and happiness,” and how he seeks to compensate for this breach by yoking happiness with guilt. Ultimately, she notes, lykke is “reduced to a sign for spiritual malaise, the nosology of which is gradually revealed” in Solness’ confessions. This is an indispensable, wide-ranging examination of the play that ends, very appropriately for The Master Builder, with an important consideration of the play’s status as tragedy.

Arnbjørn Jakobsen’s essay (12) is a contribution to his ongoing examination of the multitudinous biblical allusions in Ibsen’s plays; his first essay on this subject appeared in Edda 1994 (13), and 1997 also saw another that will be discussed later in this survey. One purpose of these essays, an obviously valuable one, is to identity all the biblical echoes in the plays under consideration, and Jakobsen has discovered many more such echoes than have been known previously. His essays in English—this one and the other from 1997—make the plays’ biblical echoes clear to the English-speaking reader by providing quotations from the Bible both in Norwegian and in the Authorized English Version and by providing English translations of the relevant passages in the plays that reproduce the biblical echoes. The primary biblical allusions in When We Dead Awaken include the Temptation of Jesus on the Mountain and The Transfiguration of Jesus as well as the obvious one of Resurrection. In addition to pointing out all the inflections of these allusions, Jakobsen considers how they operate in the play’s establishing of meaning. He sees Irene and Rubek as inhabiting a world in which Christianity no longer “has hegemony,” so that they need to construct their own “new cosmos of values,” for which they use the biblical terms, since these are the only ones they have available. As for the play itself, he sees it as “ending in a carefully balanced double perspective, death and ecstatic communion at one and the same time.” Both of these conclusions, especially the second, could stand more fully developed argumentation.

Frode Helland’s essay (14) has two features of considerable interest concerning When We Dead Awaken: a discussion of Rubek and a new choice for the art work that may have inspired the design for Rubek’s sculpture group. Drawing on Benjamin’s ideas about allegory and melancholy and using the myth of Pygmalion as a contrast, Helland sees Rubek as an “allegorist” whose “concern is to mummify life.” “There is no thought or action that can have any real consequences for Rubek,” Helland writes, “because…they will always be incorporated into a repetition of melancholy allegorization. In this way any new experience is for Rubek already part of his past experience, and in this way he has no new experiences because everything is swallowed up by the allegorical intention.” Helland disputes Daniel Haakonsen’s claim that the sculpture group derives from Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell” and proposes instead a fresco, “La Resurrezione della Carne,” produced by Luca Signorelli around 1500; judging from what Helland reports about this fresco and the reproduction of it included with the essay, this claim certainly has some merit. I would think that a discussion of Rubek’s being incapable of change ought to deal in some way with the ending of the play, but a far more serious problem with the essay is its frequent lack of coherence, especially because of a long opening that completely misfires for me. Here Helland tries to assess Ibsen’s attitudes to classical materials, but the evidence he has compiled for doing so is inadequate, and the conclusions he draws have almost nothing to do with this evidence. In any event, it is not clear to me what Ibsen’s possible attitudes toward classical materials have to do with the rest of the essay.

Jørgen Dines Johansen’s essay on When We Dead Awaken (15) examines it on three levels: “the aspirations and personal relations of the characters,” “problems concerning the credibility—or untrustworthiness—of myth’s explanatory power in [the] play,” and the play’s nature “as a not very comforting male fantasy.” The first section deals with Rubek’s marriage to Maja and his relationship with Irene in terms of “contracts and allegiances.” The second focuses on the allegorical landscape and the characters’ relation to such issues as spirituality and worldliness, spirituality and sensuality, the temptation in the wilderness, Irene’s having made a pact with the devil, and Rubek’s in effect using black magic to create a pagan version of God’s creation. The analyses in these sections are generally stunning, but they are greatly surpassed by the consideration of the play as Ibsen’s treatment of a male fantasy of the feminine. Having used Freud lightly in the first section, Johansen now uses him much more heavily and extremely well—and then goes well beyond him in ferreting out the basic images and oppositions developed in Ibsen’s text. Refusing to impose any final labels on the play or any of its aspects, Johansen opens the reader up to a dazzling array of the text’s possible plays of meaning while steadily keeping any reduction or oversimplification at bay. This is by far the richest reading of an Ibsen play that I have seen.

Ellen Hartmann discusses The Lady from the Sea (16) in relation to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, with its central theme of Death as a lover; to the “myth of the pantomime-figure Harlequin and the death mysticism associated with this figure;” to American psychologists’ characterization of what they call the “Harlequin Complex” (“which they define as a concern with punishment, death and lustful, illicit sexuality”); and to the ballad “Agnete and the Merman.” The essay helps provide or strengthen an awareness of the play’s concern with themes of death and resurrection and death and sexuality, and some details, such as the Stranger’s coming for Ellida in the autumn are particularly illuminating. For the most part, however, the focus is less on the play than on exploring the parallels and the psychologists’ interpretation of the “Harlequin Complex.” It is the latter that Hartmann finally applies to the play as an skeptical of reading Ellida in terms of some psychologists’ treatment of similar material. On the other hand, Hartmann’s ultimate explanation of her is a pretty familiar one.

Joan Templeton discusses Little Eyolf (17) as “one of the most striking examples in the Ibsen canon of the paradigmatic triangle Ibsen never tired of, that of a man caught between two contrasting women, the one ‘sexually exciting, dangerous, and demanding,’ the other ‘gentle, pale, and weak’; the one ‘strong and resolute,’ the other ‘weak, clinging, and “feminine” in the conventional sense of the word.”’ This is an important essay with an excellent analysis of the play. Those who own Templeton’s Ibsen’s Women (Cambridge University Press, 1997) will be able to find the analysis there.

Jan W. Dietrichson’s essay (18) attempts to “present as systematically as possible” Ibsen’s ideas about dramatic art and relate them to the drama theory of Ibsen’s day. The survey of Ibsen’s ideas draws on his play reviews and his journalistic articles on theater between 1851 and 1863. It is somewhat useful, but Dietrichson ignores some important texts, such as Ibsen’s review of Bjørnson’s Sigurd Slembe when it was published in book form, and he does not distinguish between texts that can be adequately summarized and those that warrant actual consultation, such as Ibsen’s review of Andreas Munch’s Lord William Russell. In any event, this aspect of Dietrichson’s effort has been done more effectively by Brian Johnston in the first chapter of To the Third Empire: Ibsen’s Early Drama (University of Minnesota Press, 1980). Somewhat more useful is Dietrichson’s sketch of drama theory in Ibsen’s era, which puts the reader in touch with the ideas of Heiberg (and of Hegel through him) and the sort of material that Ibsen could have found in the Danish and Norwegian cultural periodicals.

Elisabeth Eide’s essay (19) is a well researched and finely detailed account of the efforts to Westernize and modernize drama in China after 1895, and especially of the central role in this process played by productions and imitations of Ibsen’s plays and published accounts of Ibsen’s work.

Christen Collin’s “Henrik Ibsen’s Dramatic Construction” (20) is a translation from Norwegian of an essay that was published in Tilskueren in 1906. Collin initially focuses on Ibsen’s constant use of “the most striking motif of all dramatic literature,” the “recognition of an old and well-kept secret, which eventually is revealed and explodes violently.” His concern is to discover the source from which Ibsen derived what Collins is soon calling “the nemesis motif,” and he finds this source in the short stories and novellas of the early nineteenth-century Norwegian writer Maurits Hansen. Collins discusses several of Hansen’s stories, but he never really examines their “construction,” and before long his topic has become what Ibsen might have learned from Hansen and how much greater than Hansen he became.

I turn now to Ibsen at the Centre for Advanced Study (21), which contains essays by those who participated in the Ibsen Group at Norway’s Center for Advanced Study in Oslo for various lengths of time between fall 1992 and spring 1994. The volume opens with John Northam’s fine consideration of Ibsen’s development as a poet (22), from his developing the capacity to create poetry from everyday objects, circumstances, and experiences to his work on Brand, which Northam sees as the bridge between the poems and the later dramas of contemporary life. This essay is followed (17-58) by Northam’s translations, with notes, of the poems from Ibsen’s years in Grimstad, which are here published in English translations for the first time.

Fritz Paul’s essay (23) is primarily concerned with mapping the dissemination of Ibsen’s plays into other languages and cultures via the two main gateways of German translations (which became the basis for secondary translations into all Eastern European languages, Italian, and Japanese) and of English translations (which became the basis for secondary translations into “exotic” languages, among them languages spoken by millions, such as Chinese and Japanese). Paul also discusses the proper criteria for judging translations and the problems of translating drama as well as providing numerous details about the history of translating Ibsen.

The “Silence” in the subtitle of Inga-Stina Ewbank’s essay (24) refers to our lack of virtually any comment from Ibsen about his relations to Shakespeare, since we have no copy of or information about the talk he gave on Shakespeare in Bergen in 1855 and his extant references to Shakespeare are early, brief, and rare. In the face of this silence, Ewbank pursues Shakespeare’s probable impact on Ibsen through the contexts of his known and likely contacts with Shakespeare: the Bergen talk, the information about Shakespeare that was available to him in Scandinavia early in his career, Hermann Hettner’s discussions of Shakespeare, the Shakespearean plays Ibsen saw in Copenhagen and Dresden in 1852, the references to Shakespeare in Ibsen’s journalism in the 1850’s and 60’s, his borrowing of Shakespeare texts from the library of the Scandinavian Club in Rome, Georg Brandes’ analyses of Shakespeare that Ibsen read or probably read, and Brandes’ three-volume study of Shakespeare from 1895-96, which Ewbank sees as having an important impact on When We Dead Awaken. The essay is superbly researched and loaded with important observations springing from the research.

Arnbjørn Jakobsen’s essay (25) is similar to his other 1997 essay in that it maps out the biblical allusions in Little Eyolf and makes them fully available to the English-speaking reader, but this essay is more sophisticated theoretically and analytically and constitutes a valuable contribution to the commentary on the play. Jakobsen’s focus is primarily how the characters—especially Allmers—use biblical language in their efforts to overcome “the law of change” by devising strategies