Early Plays, Henrik Ibsen [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

INTRODUCTION Pg 1

One of the most remarkable facts about Ibsen is the orderly

development of his genius.  He himself repeatedly maintained that

his dramas were not mere isolated accidents.  In the foreword to

the readers in the popular edition of 1898 he urges the public to

read his dramas in the same order in which he had written them,

deplores the fact that his earlier works are less known and less

understood than his later works, and insists that his writings

taken as a whole constitute an organic unity.  The three of his

plays offered here for the first time in English translation will

afford those not familiar with the original Norwegian some light

on the early stages of his development.

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_Catiline_, the earliest of Ibsen's plays, was written in

1849, while Ibsen was an apothecary's apprentice in Grimstad.  It

appeared in Christiania in the following spring under the

pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme.  The revolutionary atmosphere of

1848-49, the reading of the story of Catiline in Sallust and

Cicero in preparation for the university examinations, the

hostility which existed between the apprentice and his immediate

social environment, the fate which the play met at the hands of

the theatrical management and the publishers, his own struggles

at the time,--are all set forth clearly enough in the preface to

the second edition.  The play was written in the blank verse of

Oehlenschlaeger's romantic dramas.  Ibsen's portrayal of the

Roman politician is not in accord with tradition; Catiline is not

an out-and-out reprobate, but an unfortunate and highly sensitive

individual in whom idealism and licentiousness struggle for

mastery.  Vasenius, in his study of the poet (_Ibsens

Dramatiska Diktning in dess Forsta Skede_, Helsingfors, 1879),

insists that Ibsen thus intuitively hit upon the real Catiline

revealed by later nineteenth century research. 

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The poet seems

not to have heard of Duma's _Catiline_, which appeared about

the same time, nor of earlier plays on the subject by Ben Jonson

and others.  The struggle in Ibsen's play is centered in the soul

of Catiline; not once do his political opponents appear on the

scene.  Only one critic raised his voice in behalf of the play at

the time of its appearance, and only a few copies of the original

edition survive.  Ibsen issued in 1875 a revised edition in

celebration of his twenty-fifth anniversary as an author.  Since

then a third edition has been issued in 1891, and a fourth in

1913.

 

_The Warrior's Barrow_, Ibsen's second play, was finished in

1850 shortly after the publication of _Catiline_.  Ibsen

entered upon his literary career with a gusto he seems soon to

have lost; he wrote to his friend Ole Schulerud in January, 1850,

that he was working on a play about Olaf Trygvesson, an

historical novel, and a longer poem.  He had begun _The

Warrior's Barrow_ while he was still at Grimstad, but this

early version, called _The Normans_, he revised on reaching

Christiania.  In style and manner and even in subject-matter the

play echoes Oehlenschlaeger.  Ibsen's vikings are, however, of a

fiercer type than Oehlenschlaeger's, and this treatment of viking

character was one of the things the critics, bred to

Oehlenschlaeger's romantic conception of more civilized vikings,

found fault with in Ibsen's play.  The sketch fared better than

_Catiline_: it was thrice presented on the stage in

Christiania and was on the whole favorably reviewed.

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 When Ibsen

became associated with the Bergen theater he undertook another

revision of the play, and in this version the play was presented

on the stage in 1854 and 1856.  The final version was published

in the _Bergenske Blad_ in 1854, but no copy of this issue

has survived; the play remained inaccessible to the public until

1902, when it was included in a supplementary volume (Volume X)

to Ibsen's collected works.  The earlier version remained in

manuscript form until it was printed in 1917 in _Scandinavian

Studies and Notes_ (Vol. IV, pp. 309-337).

 

_Olaf Liljekrans_, which was presented on the Bergen stage

in 1857, marks the end of Ibsen's early romantic interest.  The

original idea for this play, which he had begun in 1850, he found

in the folk-tale "The Grouse in Justedal," about a girl who alone

had survived the Black Death in an isolated village.  Ibsen had

with many others become interested in popular folk-tales and

ballads.  It was from Faye's _Norwegian Folk-Tales_ (1844)

that he took the story of "The Grouse in Justedal."  His interest

was so great that he even turned collector.  Twice during this

period he petitioned for and received small university grants to

enable him to travel and "collect songs and legends still current

among the people."

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Of the seventy or eighty "hitherto

unpublished legends" which he collected on the first of these

trips only a few have ever appeared in print; the results of his

second trip are unknown.  Ibsen had great faith in the

availability of this medieval material for dramatic purposes; he

even wrote an essay, "The Heroic Ballad and Its Significance for

Artistic Poetry," urging its superior claims in contrast to that

of the saga material, to which he was himself shortly to turn.

The original play based on "The Grouse in Justedal" was left

unfinished.  After the completion of _Lady Inger of Ostrat_

and _The Feast at Solhoug_ he came back to it, and taking a

suggestion from the ballad in Landstad's collection (1852-3) he

recast the whole play, substituted the ballad meter for the

iambic pentameters, and called the new version _Olaf

Liljekrans_.  _Olaf Liljekrans_ indicates clearly a

decline in Ibsen's interest in pure romance.  It is much more

satirical than _The Feast at Solhoug_, and marks a step in

the direction of those superb masterpieces of satire and romance,

_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_.  The play was twice presented

on the stage in Bergen with considerable success, but the critics

treated it harshly.

 

The relationship of the revised versions to the original versions

of Ibsen's early plays is interesting, and might, if

satisfactorily elucidated, throw considerable light on the

development of his genius.

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 It is evident that he was in this

early period experimenting in metrical forms.  He employed blank

verse in _Catiline_, in the original version of _The

Grouse in Justedal_, and even as late as 1853 in the revision

of _The Warrior's Barrow_.  There can be no question but

that he was here following the Ochlenschlaeger tradition.

Unrhymed pentameter, however, did not seem to satisfy him.  He

could with difficulty keep from falling into rhyme in

_Catiline_, and in the early version of _The Warrior's

Barrow_ he used rhymed pentameters.  After the revision of

this play he threw aside blank verse altogether.  "Iambic

pentameter," he says in the essay on the heroic ballad, "is by no

means the most suitable form for the treatment of ancient

Scandinavian material; this form of verse is altogether foreign

to our national meters, and it is surely through a national form

that the national material can find its fullest expression."  The

folk-tale and the ballad gave him the suggestion he needed.  In

_The Feast at Solhoug_ and the final version of _Olaf

Liljekrans_ he employed the ballad meter, and this form became

the basis for the verse in all his later metrical plays.

 

Six years intervened between _The Grouse in Justedal_ and

_Olaf Liljekrans_, and the revision in this case amounted

almost to the writing of a new play.

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Fredrik Paasche in his

study (_Olaf Liljekrans_, Christiania, 1909) discusses the

relation of _Olaf Liljekrans_ to the earlier form of the

play.  Three years intervened between the first and final

versions of _The Warrior's Barrow_.  Professor

M. Sturtevant maintains (_Journal of English and Germanic

Philology_, XII, 407 ff.) that although "the influence of

Ochlenschlaeger upon both versions of _The Warrior's Barrow_

is unmistakable," yet "the two versions differ so widely from

each other ... that it may be assumed that ... Ibsen had begun to

free himself from the thraldom of Ochlenschlaeger's romantic

conception of the viking character."  He points out the influence

of Welhaven and Heiberg on the second