Ibsen's First Steps
God was born small and crawling. Legendary Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, the second most performed playwright of all time after Shakespeare, went through at least 5 messy, derivative plays before he made something remotely worth considering. Or, at least that’s how the Great Narrative goes.
“Love’s Comedy,” Ibsen’s 8th play, is where the real fun starts. It’s the story of two guys who pursue two girls, one each. Falk and Lind, chasing Svanhild (named after a princess of legend) and Anna, respectively. Lind and Anna settle, all holy. Falk and Svanhild’s tryst unfolds differently. Falk’s a poet, an activist and… he’s looking for a muse. Svanhild marvels at his artistry a little, measures herself up. Measures him up, too. No, she tells Falk, I won’t be your muse, you can do your writing thing on your own. It’s liberation, really, abandoning the historic archetype relegation mechanism of all those artist types that wouldn’t just objectify you, they’d Generalize you, Mythify you, mutilate your personhood for the sake of metaphor. Enter: rich business guy. He tells Falk and Svanhild: your love will not last. The pair talk, really talk.
And decide he’s right. Crazy in love and utterly rational. Svanhild’s future is comfortable and miserable, by painstakingly conscious choice. Falk’s future is all about being out on his own, probably still doing his thing, pen and ink and tears and paper.
“Love’s Comedy” is widely considered to be Ibsen’s first real masterpiece. After it came “the Pretenders” (ignore that one), and then what is in my opinion the GOAT sequence of published plays. “A Doll’s House,” “Ghosts,” “Enemy of the People,” “Wild Duck,” “Romersholm,” “Hedda Gabler”. They’re all there.
So what was the darling protofeminist playwright’s deal before this historic run? Did he suck? Was “Love’s Comedy” a monumental pivot, a Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” moment?
When I started reading Ibsen’s stuff in order, it was from purely a completist impulse. I like diversity in my reading diet; I read, besides for fun, to expand my worldview and challenge my tastes. One day it hit me that maybe I was unfocused. Maybe I needed to really immerse myself in one particular author. Ibsen’s early works ended up serving both purposes. They gave me more focused insight into the Norwegian’s obsessions and quirks. They also proved challenging and taste-expanding.
It isn’t easy reading clunkily translated 19th century verse. It takes some time getting into a setting of 16th century Norway and its geopolitical conflict with Denmark. Most of Ibsen’s early plays are exactly like that – historical dramas with plots of nobles, feasts and poison. These are odd (in lieu of what I’d usually be reading; in terms of early 19th century play thematics they were probably not odd at all, maybe even crushingly standard) lyrical tragedies, more akin to awkward attempts at greek epics than the nuanced psychological drama of the later plays.
There’s some things Ibsen shed as he grew more refined. One striking element is a blatant Norwegian nationalism. In “Lady Inger,” he even tweaks historical events to stoke that anti-Denmark, pro-Norway sentiment. Norway comes out of the big battles stewing in the background of Lady Inger’s conflicted solitude as the noble, warrior force fighting the evil Danes and Swedes. It’s weirdly black and white. I think it’s sometimes alright to use less nuanced framing in campaigning for independence, and maybe that was his goal here. What’s even weirder, though, is that it just makes things up to play up the nationalism. It would have been alright if it was a wholly fabricated conflict, or perhaps if the setting was more fictionalized, but here Ibsen takes a real historical timeline (the Scandinavian Kalmar Union and the last attempts to maintain Norwegian independence within it) and changes its sequencing and choreography. A bit of alternate history that isn’t telegraphed or contextualized; in other words, historical revisionism.
It’s actually “Love’s Comedy”, again, that marks his first public reexamination of the straight nationalism of his early work. In edits to the text, he changed some words that were explicitly Norwegian to make the work more accessible to a Danish audience. This sparked a lot of hate from the more hardcore Norwegian nationalists that believed in the sacred purity of an essential Norwegian language.
Another thing he let go was verse. This he stayed with for longer, though, and his last verse play ended up being Peer Gynt, which is also coincidentally a thematic examination of various kinds of Norwegian nationalism. A lot of his early plays are in verse, and some are in prose, with random stanzas thrown in for no apparent reason.
“Love’s comedy” is in verse, and so is “Peer Gynt”. Verse seems to work for him in a few cases. Still, a more careful but unbounded approach to form is partly what makes Ibsen’s later plays so fantastic.
It’s not like he completely pivoted, though. Some of the cool things he does in his later plays are in the earlier ones too. Most notably, his obsession with strong women. In “Lady Inger”, the eponymous Lady Inger is deeply isolated as a noblewoman, simultaneously ostracized and pulling all the weight in a markedly patriarchal society. That theme of the isolation and confinement of women under patriarchy would go on to be reinterpreted in some of his best plays – “A Doll’s House,” a real classic, and “Hedda Gabbler,” that just got a lesbian movie adaptation starring Tessa Thompson as Hedda Gabler herself.
So what makes the later plays so much better? Nuance, for one. Critically facing his own nationalism and examining it in his plays. Writing as public therapy. Rearrangement, for another. His obsessions with patriarchy, class conflict, activist identity, heavy-handed symbolism, muses – these were all there in the earlier plays, it’s just that through revision, reconfiguration, playing with order and weight, he found how to make what was on his mind as impactful as possible on the page.
Reading Henrik Ibsen’s early work was sort of inspirational. And not because the plays were so interesting and idea-sowing. It’s precisely because they’re kind of stilted and obvious, these first awkward fruits of an undeniable tree, that they give me a sort of license to just play around. To feel what I’m interested in and create a silly, needlessly grandiose story out of it.
Written by Yan Nesterenko, a dedicated Writing Committee member!
You can find Yan on Instagram: @n_strenkyn