Egil Törnqvist (5) discusses some stage directions in Ibsen to show that “a play that is read always, and necessarily, affects the mind quite differently from a play that is performed.”
             In contrast to the many who have considered it “a wonder, a mystery or a puzzle that Henrik Ibsen, the leading representative of the modern drama, came from the periphery of the modern world of his age,” Jon Nygaard (6) seeks to show that Ibsen became the leading representative “just because he was born in Skien where, earlier than most of his contemporaries, he came to live through or experience the modern transformation of society,” or, as Nygaard also calls it, the “drama of modernity.”  The essay is quite wordy and repetitious, especially in the earlier sections.  The long account of Skien’s earlier prominence in mining, timber, ship building, and shipping does not seem particularly relevant.  Nygaard provides no demonstration that other areas of Norway experienced the turn to modernity later than Skien.  And many of his generalizations about the dramas of contemporary life in the final section are suspect.  Nonetheless the section on Ibsen and Skien (91-95), which focuses on the upper class of Skien in Ibsen’s time there and on the financial ruin of his father Knud, makes a very good argument for Nygaard’s claim.  A sample: “What actually happened in the case of Knud Ibsen was a consequence of modernity as essentially a post-traditional order where social life is propelled away from the security of pre-established precepts or practices.  Modernity breaks down the protective framework of the small community and of tradition, replacing these with much larger impersonal organizations.  The individual feels bereft and alone in a world in which he or she lacks the support and the sense of security provided by more traditional settings.”
            William Mishler approaches Ibsen (7) through René Girard’s concept of “mimetic desire”—the notion that a human being learns what to desire by observing what another human being desires—and especially the “mimetic triangle” that results when both come to desire the same thing and the observed human being thus becomes “an obstacle, a potential rival.”  To illustrate the “mimetic triangle,” Mishler analyzes the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles at the beginning of The Iliad, noting that “it puts in evidence the objective roots of human ‘madness’ in everyday human intersubjectivity, which otherwise tends to be viewed as a mental aberration of a private and subjective nature. The masterworks of literature suggest that [this ‘madness’] is the knot in which the human animal is tied.” He then turns to Ibsen, putting his primary focus on certain poems in which Ibsen “shows himself discovering and becoming attuned to” the mechanisms of the “mimetic triangle.” He argues that the  enormous advance  Ibsen made  in  his

art with Brand and Peer Gynt came about because “the political and military events of 1863” made Ibsen realize that “there was something like mimetic rivalry at work in the interactions of nations.”  The analysis of “Players” [“Spillemænd”] shows that Ibsen was already conscious of the mimetic triangle when he wrote the poem in 1851, at the age of twenty-three.  This poem also prompts an important consideration of the word “gru” in Ibsen’s work (gru “carries connotations of the horrible and the uncanny, usually with reference to death”). The poems discussed constitute the focus of the article, but Mishler also has many excellent things to say about the plays as well. This is a very interesting and very important look at Ibsen.
             Roland Lysell’s intention in his consideration of Rosmersholm (8) is to suggest an alternative to the “conventional analysis” of the play by examining it in terms of Leo Bersani’s account of “textual desire,” a Lacanian concept.  The essay has some interesting ideas in its second half, but much of the first half is given over to an unnecessary distinction between text and performance and to a good deal of plot summary.  I would also have liked a fuller clarification of Bersani’s “fundamental concepts.”
             Anne Brit Gran’s essay (9, in Norwegian) is concerned with the “fall of theatricality” in Norway, the period in which theater made a transition from being a social institution that openly proclaimed its nature as theater and included the spectator within its workings to becoming a self-enclosed entity that no longer acknowledged the spectator’s presence.  Drawing on various kinds of evidence she dates this transition as approximately 1850, the year before Ibsen accepted his first theater post in Bergen.  She then turns to the archival evidence of the productions that Ibsen directed or had impact on, to the plays he wrote in Bergen, and to his theater reviews of the time to show how he contributed to the fall of theatricality in Norway by his deviations from the standard practices of most Norwegian theaters and directors of the era.  These deviations include having the actors move back from the proscenium and deliver their speeches to one another rather than to the audience, eliminating the standard “epic-declamatory” manner of speaking, designing more natural looking scenery, and devising stage settings that draw the spectators more deeply into the performance.   This is an excellent discussion of a good topic.
             Uwe Englert provides a well researched and extremely interesting account of a production of The Wild Duck put on in a Jewish theater in Berlin after the Nazi takeover of Germany (10, in Norwegian).  Englert informs us why the Nazis tolerated and eventually demanded the continued operation of the Jewish theaters (this is where the “maskerade” of his title  comes  in)  and  distinguishes  between  the