Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler: Full Text and Introduction

D RAMA C LASSICS HEDDA GABLER by
Henrik Ibsen translated and introduced by
Kenneth McLeish NICK HERN BOOKS
London www.nickhernbooks.co.uk Contents Introduction Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828-1904) When Ibsen was 23, he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly-established Norwegian National Theatre in Bergen. Six years later he was made Director of the Norwegian Theatre in Kristiania (now Oslo), a post he held until 1862. Ibsen found his years in the theatre intensely frustrating. The towns were small and the audiences parochial and frivolous-minded. His own plays at the time were chiefly historical dramas, some in verse, modelled on those of Shakespeare, Schiller and Hugo. In the end the Norwegian Theatre lost its audience, ran out of money, and in 1864, after two years of poverty (aggravated by alcoholism and depression) Ibsen left Norway for Italy and Germany, countries in which he spent the next 27 years.

The first two plays Ibsen wrote in self-imposed exile, the verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), established his reputation. With characteristic iron will, however, he immediately changed his style. He dropped verse for prose (which was more suitable, he said, for serious subjects), and from 1877 onwards, wrote no more plays on historical or folk-inspired subjects. His subsequent plays (a dozen from The Pillars of Society , 1879, to When We Dead Awaken , 1899) all dealt with contemporary social or philosophical issues, and were set among the provincial bourgeoisie. They regularly caused scandal, and took time to find favour with critics and the middle-class audiences whose lives and concerns they dramatised. Other critics (notably Archer and Shaw in Britain) ralliedto his cause, and by his sixties (the time of his greatest plays), he had become the grand old man not only of Scandinavian literature but of European theatre in general.

The problem play of which he was a pioneer has been a staple theatre genre ever since. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891. He wrote four more plays, but in 1901 suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes, the last of which proved fatal. Hedda Gabler: What Happens in the Play The action takes place in the new house of Jrgen and Hedda Tesman (ne Gabler), the day after they return from a six-month honeymoon. One by one, we meet the main characters. Aunt Julia is a good-hearted spinster who brought up her adored nephew Tesman and is dazzled by his marriage to the sophisticated, slightly terrifying Hedda.

Tesman, in love equally with Hedda and scholarship, doesnt notice that she fails to share his enthusiasm for domestic crafts in the fourteenth century, and looks forward to being given a professorship especially now that his main rival, Ejlert Lvborg, seems to be ruled out because of dissipation. Judge Brack, an old friend of Heddas who organised the buying and furnishing of the new house, looks forward to a cosy triangular friendship with them now that theyre back, one in which he can come and go exactly as he pleases. Hedda, for her part, is already bored to distraction by the domesticity of her marriage, and reacts by irony, sharpness and practical jokes on Aunt Julia and Tesman. However, she rejects Bracks offer of intimacy: she chose to marry Tesman and is prepared to put up with the situation, even at the expense of her own happiness. Despite this, she longs for a life to control, to feel responsible for. In the poverty of her situation (both existential and literal Tesman has not yet begun to earn his professorial salary), she says that she has only one comfort left, her fathers old duelling pistols.

Into this situation come two outsiders. Mrs Elvsted, an old schoolfellow of Heddas, arrives from out of town to find Lvborg, who was her childrens tutor until he recently disappeared. She reveals that he is a reformed character, that she has helped him to write a book and that she loves him. Brack announces that Lvborg is a candidate for the same professorship as Tesman, and finally Lvborg himself arrives, to the consternation of both Tesman and Hedda. Tesman is dismayed (though professionally excited) by the brilliance of Lvborgs ideas, particularly those in the book-manuscript hes carrying. Hedda is disturbed by memories of their previous relationship, and by jealousy of his and Mrs Elvsteds intimacy.

Even so, when he tries to flirt with her, she spurns him as she previously rejected Brack. The men go to Bracks for a bachelor party. Mrs Elvsted has tried and failed to stop Lvborg going, and Hedda has urged him to show that he is still in control of his own destiny, and to come back with vine leaves in his hair. The party lasts all night, and when Tesman returns, dishevelled, we learn that it turned into a drunken orgy, and that Lvborg got so drunk that he lost the precious manuscript which he, Tesman, rescued. Tesman gives the manuscript to Hedda to return to Lvborg, and goes to lie down. Hedda, however, has other plans.

When Lvborg arrives, distraught by the loss of his book and blaming himself for killing his own child by giving in once more to dissipation, instead of telling him that its found she gives him a pistol and tells him to salvage his dignity and integrity by making a fine suicide. As soon as hes gone she stuffs the manuscript in the stove and burns it. When Tesman wakes up, Hedda tells him about the package, and claims that she burned it for his sake and because shes carrying their child. Tesman, overwhelmed by the thoughts that she loves him and that his future is secure, stifles his moral qualms. But then Brack comes in to report that Lvborg is dead not finely, but sordidly after a brawl in a brothel and Tesman and Mrs Elvsted decide to reconstruct the book from Lvborgs notes and Mrs Elvsteds memory (Lvborg dictated it to her). Hedda asks if she can help, and they brush her aside.

Brack tells her that the police have her pistol, and that he (Brack) will tell them who it belongs to unless she agrees to go on living on his terms. Instead of her controlling another human beings destiny, she has delivered herself into someone elses power. Stripped of everything she once had or used to be, she goes into the next room and shoots herself. The Problem Play and the Well-Made Play The problem play was a response, in mid-19th-century European theatre, to an upsurge in public discussion of big social and philosophical issues. Favoured topics were the differing natures and social roles of women and men, family relationships, sexual behaviour, religion, politics and social ethics. The plays were set among ordinary, contemporary people, whose dilemmas onstage embodied the questions under discussion.

The problem plays of some writers for example Bjrnson in Norway, Sardou in France, Grundy and Jones in Britain were often creaking and contrived: sermons or newspaper leaders disguised as art. (Shaw coined the nickname Sardoodledum; Wilde memorably said, There are three rules for the young playwright. The first rule is not to write like Jones. The second and third rules are the same.) But in other hands, notably Ibsens, concentration on character and on personal tragedy elevated the form. Even such preachy plays as Ghosts or An Enemy of the People make their impact through the vitality of their characters and situations rather than the underlying issues they address. Rules for the well-made play were formulated in France in the early 19th century, and quickly spread throughout Europe.

They were as strict as those Aristotle laid down for ancient tragedy (see below, p. x). In a well-made play, action shouldbe organised in three sections: exposition of the central problem, alarms and excursions, dnouement. The plot should hinge on a secret or a dilemma which affects the main character; the audience should be allowed only hints and glimpses of this as the play proceeds, and all should be fully revealed only as the action moves towards dnouement. There should be reversal of fortune up in a well-made farce, down in a well-made melodrama. And finally, settings, dialogue and behaviour should be contemporary and conventional.