We have to stand firm against all this experimentation that a restless age would like to foist on us - Ibsen systems

Yes, that’s the spirit!  What is most curious about Henrik Ibsen’s last twelve plays, from Pillars of Society (1877) through When We Dead Awaken (1899), and including his big chart-toppers like A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and Hedda Gabler (1890) is the temptation to treat them as a single big work, a thousand page avant garde novel in prose dialogue.  Ibsenists, beginning with George Bernard Shaw in 1891, insist that the plays need to be performed and seen in order, as with Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.  Has this ever been done?  I did not even read the plays in chronological order, but rather in an order something like most to least famous.

I am certain, as a result, to be hopelessly confused about who appeared and what happened in which play.  Apologies in advance.

Ibsen scholar Brian Johnston has done the most audacious work, building the case that “the twelve plays constituted a single tripartite Cycle whose subject was modern humanity undergoing (in Hegelian terms) a journey of spiritual recollection,” and when he says “Hegelian,” he means it: each play is built around a stage of history as found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit.  Johnston took the unusual and admirable step of converting his books and research into a website, Ibsen Voyages, which I have used frequently.  It is full of valuable criticism and information even for the reader who finds the Hegel business laughable on its face.  I am unequipped to evaluate the argument, but am thrilled that it exists, a visionary critic’s mad work on a visionary playwright.

And like I said, the impulse is so common.  George Bernard Shaw finds a sustained ironic assault on bourgeois hypocrisy (“idealism,” he calls it), all detailed with verve in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).  Robert Brustein makes Ibsen the founder of the Theatre of Revolt (The Theatre of Revolt, 1964).  Hey Henrik, what are you rebelling against?  Whatta ya got?  “The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions – to destroy” – this is from an 1883 description of Ibsen expressing his views at a party, found in footnote 1 on page 38 of Brustein.

Here is the temptation, really.  Less subtle followers of Shaw, or really anyone who reads or sees the play, knows that A Doll House is an early feminist protest against the inequities, legal and social, or marriage.  Thus, Ibsen invents realist theater.  Prose, an ordinary family, a social issue reformed, at least for the audience.  Yet in later plays the actions of the heroine are rerun with different outcomes – she considers suicide; later characters do more than consider; she triumphantly leaves her husband; a later trapped wife stays with hers (admittedly, her alternative is not necessarily freedom but life with a sea troll).  If we think of plot as part of the author’s argument, and in doom-laden plays like these it has to be, allowing multiple outcomes in analogous situations undermines the argument of the earlier plots.

It is almost as if Ibsen invents realistic, socially engaged theater in the first four of the twelve plays, and then, once it is an existing institution, feels the need to blow it up. A grand scheme allows the critic to at least blow up received ideas about the plays.

Luckily, I do not understand Ibsen well enough to have developed any grand scheme of my own, so from this point I will just rummage through the plays themselves.  But they do hook back into each other and I will not resist following the connections, no matter how confusing.

For consistency and sanity, all quotations from these plays will be from Rolf Fjelde’s translations, with page numbers referring to The Complete Major Prose Plays (1978), Farrar Straus Giroux.  The post;s title is from Pillars of Society, Act I, p. 17.