A Doll's House and Other Plays (Penguin) Read online

  1900 When We Dead Awaken is performed at the Hoftheater in Stuttgart on 26 January.

  C. H. Herford translates Love’s Comedy; William Archer translates When We Dead Awaken.

  Ibsen suffers a first stroke in March, and his health deteriorates over the next few years.

  James Joyce’s ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’ appears in The Fortnightly Review in April.

  1903 Imperial Theatre, London, produces When We Dead Awaken on 25 January and The Vikings at Helgeland on 15 April.

  1906 On 23 May Henrik Ibsen dies in his home in Arbins gate 1 in Kristiania.

  The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, translated and edited by William Archer, appears in twelve volumes over the next two years.

  Introduction

  ‘The sound of the street door being slammed is heard from below.’

  That famous stage direction, the last words on the last page of a play which in English tends to bear the title of A Doll’s House, was first read, albeit in Henrik Ibsen’s original Dano-Norwegian, in December 1879. Since then it has reverberated throughout the world, from Copenhagen to Canberra, from New York to New Delhi, from Bejing to Bristol.

  A Doll’s House, in which Nora leaves not only her husband but also her young children, has led to controversial and celebrated productions and received iconic status both as a play and as a central document of female emancipation. It has even been hailed as ‘one of the great pages of bourgeois culture: on a par with Kant’s word on the Enlightenment, or Mill’s on liberty’.1 And it has, without exaggeration, contributed to change in numerous people’s lives and, however directly or indirectly, in societies at large. Ibsen’s art somehow continues to affect us, to produce spellbinding and transformative effects, around the world, well over a hundred years since it was first produced.

  How did such dramatic innovation occur, and that from Henrik Ibsen, a nineteenth-century Norwegian, someone shaped by a culture and writing for a readership and audience at a great remove from the cultural centres of the world? How did Ibsen end up as ‘the Father of Modern Drama’?

  The Great Dependant

  ‘Never before has a poet of world-wide fame appealed to his world-wide audience so exclusively in translations.’2 The theatre critic and translator William Archer’s observation, made in 1901, may serve as a reminder of how most readers and spectators encounter Ibsen, whether on page or stage. Coming from a small language culture, Ibsen was to depend on translation from the early point at which his plays began to travel, and he has remained so till this day; his status as world author or world dramatist was from the very beginning aided by the work of others: by translators, critics, publishers, scholars, actors, directors, as well as, inevitably, by new readers and audiences.

  Ibsen’s plays may thus be seen as poignant examples of one of the most frequently quoted definitions of world literature as ‘writing that gains in translation’.3 Gaining in this respect does not of course mean in every respect or in every instance, and the new meanings created in and through translation are not necessarily better than the first or earlier ones. But since having had his first play translated in 1857, Ibsen has been the recipient of innumerable readings and stagings abroad, often in the form of strong appropriations and radical reuses of the originals, and these have certainly accomplished more than, and different things from, what has been achieved within his native culture. His plays have gained, more generally, simply by reaching audiences to whom he would not otherwise have been available. Translation has been an inescapable part of Ibsen’s survival as a classic and has given him his current status of a global phenomenon.

  Ibsen, it ought to be added on a general note, reinvented his nation’s language; Norwegian (as well as Danish) was not the same after him. And it is impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult, to convey the freshness – including the neologisms and new coinages – the strangeness and poetic qualities of his works. Contrary to widely shared notions of a prosaic realist, Ibsen’s plays represent no transparent window to reality or the world; his prose is subtle, complex and self-conscious and has habitually been exposed to a smoothing-out and flattening in English.4 If we want to confront Ibsen and the ‘Ibsenesque’ in as much of its richness and complexity as possible, linguistic, aesthetic, historical and cultural, we need at the very least to be conscious of the fact that we are encountering him and it in translation. Starting in a small language, Ibsen is a dependant, always strikingly at the mercy of mediation.

  And something is always lost in translation.5 Take, as a way into this volume of Ibsen’s first four so-called modern prose dramas, the titles of the plays. The first one, Samfundets støtter, has most often been translated as The Pillars of Society. But the key word ‘samfund’ in Dano-Norwegian (Ibsen’s written language was Danish, but he availed himself of many Norwegian words, expressions and constructions) contains the meanings of both ‘society’ and ‘community’, with the latter here being more prominent than the former. This is not least so in the play’s title, and this edition calls it Pillars of the Community. The expression ‘et dukkehjem’ was a neologism in Dano-Norwegian in Ibsen’s time, only, as far as we know, used once before in writing, and it literally means ‘a doll home’ (the closer equivalent of ‘a doll house’, ‘et dukkehus’, was available to Ibsen, and he did not use the genitive form, ‘en dukkes hus’; this is not just the doll Nora’s house, but a home for dolls). But Ibsen’s most famous play is so strongly established as A Doll’s House in English that we have chosen to retain it here.6 The next play, Ghosts, was called Gengangere by Ibsen, and is both more evocative and poetic in the original, literally meaning ‘something that or someone who walks again’, primarily with reference to a belief in people who return from the dead. It is closer to the French translation Les Revenants than to the English Ghosts. And, finally, the title of the last of the plays in this volume, An Enemy of the People, En folkefiende, had a much more novel feel to it when Ibsen first used it in Scandinavia in 1882 than it has today or even than it had when first translated into English. The compound ‘folkefiende’ had only rarely been used in Danish and Swedish, and then with the more restricted meaning of ‘an enemy of democracy’.

  The Contemporary Turn

  How, then, was Ibsen possible? And why should he be of concern to anyone outside his own country, one which had hardly yet produced a literature of its own when he began writing and publishing in the 1850s? There are, of course, no single or simple answers to such questions. But we may get somewhere by considering where he came from and the contexts in which his art was first created.

  When the plays in this volume began to travel through the world from the 1880s onwards, they inevitably triggered questions of relevance. Why should theatre audiences and readers in London, Paris or Berlin feel that these new plays from the continent’s periphery applied to them? Why should Americans, Australians and Indians think that this was about them? Many wondered and expressed their puzzlement. A great number of foreign critics began by simply rejecting him as irrelevant, as what they called ‘provincial’, of no use to the centre and their own understanding of the world.

  For quite some time, then, Ibsen was seen as a conspicuously backward writer. ‘If Ibsen were an Englishman … I should say that he was provincial; I should say that he was suburban,’ the conservative British critic Frederic Wedmore typically noted.7 The same critic wondered how such a playwright could claim ‘to be a “path-breaker” for our world of Western civilisation if the world he represents lies under conditions from which this Western world has long ago been delivered’.8 The cosmopolitan American Henry James – who after some initial scepticism became an Ibsen devotee – asked how this ‘provincial of provincials’ could have produced such captivating art, originating as it did ‘too far from Piccadilly and our glorious standards’.9 To James it was a ‘miracle’ every time Ibsen produced yet another play of such fascinating quality and attraction. He was struck by the advanced, ‘civilized’ and ‘evolved’ form of Ibsen’s dramas, seen
in relation to the ‘bareness and bleakness of his little northern democracy’. Almost every critic or literary mediator who took part in what became a cultural and political battle over Ibsen in Britain in the late 1880s and early 1890s, be he or she what was termed an ‘Ibsenite’ or an ‘Anti-Ibsenite’ or something in between, seems to have felt a need to relate to the problem of Ibsen’s provincialism, and not just to his foreignness per se.

  If we move beyond these inherited narratives and stereotypes, however, Ibsen’s Norway was, in certain significant ways, not the backwater imagined by many foreign critics. For one thing, Norway, and Denmark, to which it for cultural purposes still belonged (the union between the two countries had been dissolved in 1814, and Norway had since been in a union with Sweden), were import cultures in literary terms. With an extremely small literary and dramatic output of its own, Norwegian publishing and theatre were dominated by continental impulses. This meant that Ibsen was deeply familiar with the plays and conventions of nineteenth-century European drama. When he entered the profession, Norway had, furthermore, an emerging national theatre movement, one which, through first giving him experience as a theatre director at Det norske Theater (The Norwegian Theatre) in Bergen from the age of twenty-three, gave him an early chance of hands-on experience. Besides this came both a system of state stipends and an extraordinary Scandinavian, or more precisely Dano-Norwegian, book market which developed with Ibsen and helped secure his freedom as a writer. Well before he came to write the plays which appear in this volume, Ibsen was a commercially successful author in his home market, a much-admired writer and poet supported by the state; he had acquired the liberty to focus solely on his drama. In his writing, he redeployed the resources of his culture, which is, of course, not to say that he only operated from within existing norms. His plays were also about responding to a set of contemporary issues which came to be seen as European, if not international, in nature, and they included contestation, conflict and change. In this way Ibsen created something which was to be seen and experienced as new: contemporary tragedies of middle-class life.

  An exaggerated emphasis on Ibsen’s twenty-seven years of exile from his native country – he left in the spring of 1864, spending his time in Italy and Germany, and only resettled in 1891 – may also have blinded us to the resources available to him at home, resources which must be taken into account if we are to understand his astonishing career. One of these paradoxical resources was the fact that the dominant genre of the nineteenth century, the novel, had not yet come into its own in Norway or Denmark. At the outset of Ibsen’s career, the drama was still a respectable option for a Norwegian writer. Contrary to the greatest writing talents in the larger European cultures, Ibsen therefore came to invest his energy and creativity in the renewal of, and, in a European context, the elevation of, the drama.

  Over a period of just over twenty years, beginning in 1877 and ending in 1899, Ibsen produced a series of twelve plays which seemed to engage more or less directly with his contemporary world, i.e., with the plight of the middle classes in a capitalist society. His series of modern plays are all written in prose, which was not entirely new for Ibsen. He had tried it on contemporary material already in The League of Youth (1869), but then in the form of satire or prose comedy. And in what he intended to be his ‘main work’ (‘hovedværk’),10 his colossal drama of ideas set in Ancient Rome, Emperor and Galilean (1873), he had chosen to reject verse as the appropriate form for contemporary drama. The illusion which he wanted to produce was that of ‘the real’, Ibsen noted.11 ‘We no longer live in the age of Shakespeare’, he added, explaining that he had wanted to portray ‘human beings’. It had thus been necessary to reject the ‘language of the gods’. Emperor and Galilean was to be a new kind of tragedy, the playwright insisted, although he had still concerned himself with an emperor.

  The Norwegian context was still crucial to Ibsen’s development, in the midst of his self-imposed exile: his fellow Norwegian and long-term rival, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, had started writing prose plays with contemporary topics two years earlier (A Bankruptcy, 1875), and this is likely to have influenced a change of direction. Georg Brandes, the influential Danish critic associated with the so-called ‘Modern Breakthrough’ in Scandinavia, had hailed these plays as finally heralding the introduction of a new era, that of ‘the now and reality’.12 Ibsen must also, more generally, have registered a ‘social turn’ in contemporary debates, one which meant a new interest in social issues, not just poverty or ‘the labour question’, but also the family and the ‘the woman question’. But form was clearly central to his new vision, as was, when he came to A Doll’s House, his eye for dramatic potential and conflict. When the playwright in 1883, ten years after Emperor and Galilean, looked back on his own choice of prose, he stressed ‘the much more difficult art of writing a consistently truthful language of reality’.13 These statements are also true of the plays which followed from 1877, but with one important difference: Ibsen shifts his attention to the here and now.

  Ibsen’s plays were no longer to treat of topics from his nation’s distant past or of a classical subject matter. Nor do they concern themselves with the aristocracy or nobility. Not only does the playwright turn his attention to contemporary society, while creating his own artistic mythology; he decides to scrutinize the life of a particular, emerging class. ‘No other writer’, Franco Moretti asserts, ‘has focused so single-mindedly on the bourgeois world’.14 Workers are hardly present in Ibsen’s twenty-year-long experiment, Moretti notes, because the ambition is to explore conflicts ‘internal to the bourgeoisie itself’. The wrongdoings perpetrated within these plays characteristically inhabit ‘an elusive grey area’, an area of ‘reticence, disloyalty, slander, negligence, half truths’. It is this grey area Ibsen explores with such painstaking attention; it is within this grey area that the characters of his play operate. While a number of Ibsen’s central characters, and perhaps also the playwright himself, may seem to entertain dreams of absolute freedom and truth, such ideals are never achieved. Ibsen is one of the great chroniclers of such greyness, of muddle and untidiness, of the less than perfect, of everyday life.

  Pillars of the Community

  The first play in this volume begins by thematizing the backwardness of Norway. In the very first scene of Pillars of the Community, Rørlund, the schoolmaster, dismisses all ‘these larger societies and communities’ (the original word is ‘samfund’) as ‘whited sepulchres’. ‘Out there’ is immorality, the subversion of family values, general rottenness and corruption. At home the task is to ‘close the door’ to the outside world. Rørlund goes on to suggest to his lady friends that they ‘shut ourselves off a little from this’, and then draws the curtains. But already at the end of this act the exiled Lona Hessel has arrived from America with a declared intention of letting in ‘some fresh air’. So she goes on to do, and that in a number of ways. But it is hard not to think of this line as also representing Ibsen’s poetics, part of what he wants to achieve with the play and, perhaps, more generally, by opening up the territory of his chosen art form, the drama. And while he clearly began by wanting to expose his fellow countrymen’s insularity, his works soon came to appear as acutely relevant to others than the original audience. Among other things they seemed to question any kind of self-satisfied position, any contentedness with the status quo, the lack of ability to adopt other perspectives than one’s own. From a two-way movement, then, between home and abroad, periphery and centre, indoors and outdoors, smugness and openness, stems much of the dynamic of Pillars of the Community, as well as some of its central concerns. And these are issues that continue to be explored, albeit in ever new ways, through both radical and subtle changes in perspective, throughout the remainder of Ibsen’s plays.

  Samfundets støtter, Pillars of the Community, was published in Copenhagen (Ibsen had opted for the Danish publisher Gyldendal since the publication of Brand (1866), and had, from this point onwards, reached a substantially larger
readership and obtained greater financial security) on 11 October 1877. By this time, Ibsen had already made something of a name for himself in Germany. An authorized German edition was rushed out in November 1877, but – the playwright’s copyright not being protected – it was followed by two unauthorized translations within the next two months. The sales at home also exceeded expectations, and the first edition of 7,000 copies sold out within days. From about this time onwards, Ibsen insisted that book publication would precede first performances, and these followed in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in November and December. In Germany, the play’s success in the theatres was phenomenal; in early February 1878 it was played in five different Berlin theatres at the same time, and had been produced by twenty-six other German theatres by the end of the year.

  Ibsen should, in other words, not be thought of as a marginalized or avant-garde writer at this point. He was established as one of the leading writers in Norway as well as in Denmark, and was a commercial success in both Scandinavia and Germany.15 In Britain the play’s fate was somewhat different. The critic who later went on to become Ibsen’s main translator and most important mediator, William Archer, managed to have it produced in adapted form in December 1880 in London, under the title Quicksands, but without success. The play did not appear in book form in English until 1888, but then as the lead play in Ibsen’s first English-language publishing success, The Pillars of Society, and Other Plays (which included Ghosts and An Enemy of the People), edited by Archer and with an introduction by the social reformer, physician and psychologist Havelock Ellis. The year after, the theatre columnist of The Sunday Times ironically admitted that the play ‘may excite Scandinavian audiences’, while noting the absolute need of adaption to ‘English theatrical conditions’, unless The Pillars of Society become ‘the pillows of society’.16