Hedda Gabler E-Book

Henrik Ibsen

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. This Drama Classics edition of Henrik Ibsen's tragedy of a restless, discontented wife and the impact of her jealous machinations is translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

HEDDA GABLER

by Henrik Ibsen

translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Ibsen: Key Dates

Characters and Pronunciation

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

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) rallied to 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 Jørgen and Hedda Tesman (née 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, doesn’t 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 Løvborg, seems to be ruled out because of dissipation. Judge Brack, an old friend of Hedda’s who organised the buying and furnishing of the new house, looks forward to a cosy ‘triangular’ friendship with them now that they’re 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 Brack’s 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 father’s old duelling pistols.

Into this situation come two outsiders. Mrs Elvsted, an old schoolfellow of Hedda’s, arrives from out of town to find Løvborg, who was her children’s 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 Løvborg is a candidate for the same professorship as Tesman, and finally Løvborg himself arrives, to the consternation of both Tesman and Hedda. Tesman is dismayed (though professionally excited) by the brilliance of Løvborg’s ideas, particularly those in the book-manuscript he’s carrying. Hedda is disturbed by memories of their previous relationship, and by jealousy of his and Mrs Elvsted’s intimacy. Even so, when he tries to flirt with her, she spurns him as she previously rejected Brack.

The men go to Brack’s for a bachelor party. Mrs Elvsted has tried and failed to stop Løvborg 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 Løvborg got so drunk that he lost the precious manuscript which he, Tesman, rescued. Tesman gives the manuscript to Hedda to return to Løvborg, and goes to lie down. Hedda, however, has other plans. When Løvborg 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 it’s found she gives him a pistol and tells him to salvage his dignity and integrity by making a ‘fine’ suicide. As soon as he’s 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 she’s 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 Løvborg is dead – not ‘finely’, but sordidly after a brawl in a brothel – and Tesman and Mrs Elvsted decide to reconstruct the book from Løvborg’s notes and Mrs Elvsted’s memory (Løvborg 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 being’s destiny, she has delivered herself into someone else’s 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 Bjørnson 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 Ibsen’s, 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 should be organised in three sections: exposition of the central problem, alarms and excursions, dénouement. 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 dénouement. 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. Tens of thousands of ‘well-made’ plays were written, and most are justly forgotten. (Victorian melodramas are typical examples.) But in the hands of fine writers – Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias and Labiche’s farces spring to mind, not to mention Maugham’s or Rattigan’s plays in a later age – the recipe has led to masterpieces. ‘Well-made’ conventions, in whole or in part, were particularly useful to writers of ‘problem plays’, whose effect on their audience depended, in part, on putting a spin on familiar-seeming characters and situations and on received ideas.

Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler was first produced in 1890. It deals with a favourite Ibsen theme, the conflict between individual spiritual freedom and the claims of convention and society. It resembles the plays which preceded it (Pillars of the Community, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck) in that it is entirely realistic, tragedy in a domestic setting. (In fact domesticity is one of the main causes of the tragedy.) At the same time, it anticipates some of the symbolism and ‘otherness’ of such later plays as Master Builder Solness or Rosmersholm. There are times when it is not just to herself, but to the other characters and to us as well, that Hedda seems to come from a different planet from everyone else. (Ibsen may have had this quality in mind when he talked of the play’s ‘demonism’.)

Hedda Gabler quickly became established, not least because it offers such a superb challenge to the leading actress. Within a few months of its Norwegian premiere, it was staged in Germany, Britain and the USA, and it has been revived more frequently than any Ibsen play except The Wild Duck. (Notable English-language Heddas, over the years, have included Janet Achurch, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Sonia Dresdel, Peggy Ashcroft and Fiona Shaw. In 1975 Glenda Jackson played the role on screen, recreating her striking stage performance.) It has influ enced playwrights from Shaw (Candida follows its structure particularly closely) to Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf plays bleak variations on its themes of marital incompatibility and emotional dependence and predation), and its legacy is also apparent in hundreds of excellent film melodramas, from Joan Crawford’s and Bette Davis’ 1940s vehicles to the more recent, more explicitly feminist ‘problem films’ of such actresses as Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep.

Form

Ibsen’s later plays are formally dazzling: tightly structured, without a loose end or a wasted word. But even among them, Hedda Gabler is exceptional. One of the most striking things about it is its harmonisation of the the conventions of the ‘well-made’ play with a much grander set of ‘rules’: those deduced from classical Greek tragedy and noted by Aristotle. Hedda Gabler observes the unities: it happens in one place, in a single stretch of time, in a sequence of action which proceeds without interruption or divergence from beginning to end. Characters and action are totally integrated: even Aunt Rina, lying unseen on her death-bed, plays a crucial role in the unfolding of events. The plot concerns a ‘tragic flaw’ in the leading character: a psychological failing, at first unperceived, which is gradually revealed and which engenders the character’s doom. That doom is inevitable from the beginning of the play, and is worked out inexorably before our eyes. There is a moment of recognition: a climactic point when the leading character realises that she is trapped by her own nature and actions and that her destruction is inevitable. The cathartic event of violence takes place offstage.

Aristotelian ideas influence the play’s structure as well as its themes. The characteristic organisation of structure in surviving Greek tragedy is an introduction and five sections, of which the last is a kind of extended musical ‘coda’. These are interspersed with choral sections which link, frame and counterpoint the main action. The five-act division of Renaissance tragedy probably imitated this pattern, without the choruses. In Hedda Gabler, Ibsen follows a four-act pattern, dispensing with the coda. Each Act, like each spoken section in Greek tragedy, is a contained thematic unit, advancing the action in a single direction, moving it a few more irretraceable steps towards ultimate catastrophe. The content of Acts 2-4 is not guessable at the end of Act One; that of Acts 3-4 is not guessable at the end of Act Two, and so on – and yet, in retrospect, we recognise that each later event has been prepared and prefigured in what has gone before. The sense of inevitable progression is also achieved by the narrowing focus of the action. Each Act is shorter than the one before, and the broad sweep of the opening (exhibiting Berta’s character, for example, for the only time in the play, before revealing something of Hedda’s and Tesman’s characters in the way they treat Aunt Julia) is never repeated, yielding instead to extremely close attention on single moments, individual relationships, single plot-developments. The way in which, in the play’s last three or four pages, Hedda is left with nothing, and with nowhere to turn, is remarkable given that the rhythms of the writing are as easy and everyday as in the entire rest of the play (see page xiii). Its power comes from the inexorable elimination of the inessential, the irising-in, which has preceded it and has continued, uninterrupted, from the first moments of Act One.

Fate and Hubris

Although Ibsen follows the ‘rules’ of Greek tragedy (so closely that it seems unlikely to be by chance), he studiously avoids one of its major themes. Greek tragedies were part of a religious occasion, and their action – usually drawn from myth – arose from the attempts of human beings to come to terms with the nature and demands of the supernatural. The gods in Greek tragedy are devious, all-powerful and implacable, and the fate they oversee for mortals is arbitrary (at least in mortal eyes) and inescapable. The tragic flaw which destroys the protagonist is often hubris: the arrogance which makes mortals think they can transcend their own mortality. None of this applies in Ibsen. Sternly atheist, unswervingly rationalist, he allows religion no part in the events of Hedda Gabler. When characters do invoke God (Tesman; Mrs Elvsted; Miss Tesman) it is a superficial, conventional way of talking, to add emphasis to otherwise bland remarks – and Ibsen the ironist takes it one step further when he makes Brack invoke, for the same purpose, not the deity but the devil. The only ‘supernatural’ force in Hedda Gabler is a bleak certainty that to think is to suffer and to take a moral stand is to die. Two of the most ‘religious’ characters, Tesman and Mrs Elvsted, are involved in the greatest compro mises of principle. This is not Fate but a kind of personification of Ibsen’s characteristic pessimism: inevitability of failure seen almost as an enabling force, at least until you fail.

The second main force on Ibsen’s characters, as dominating as the power of religious observance in Greek tragedy, is social convention. Society and its rules may be human constructs (but so, Ibsen the atheist might have argued, are religious dogma and ritual); but their weight, in this play, is as great as if they had been ordained by God. Characters may take a dozen different approaches to them, from unthinking observance through ironical lip-service to manipulation and challenge, but the rules themselves seldom change. Given Hedda’s ‘station’ in life, and given the situations of Tesman and his aunts, no meeting of minds is possible without self-destructive compromise on someone’s part. For Tesman (essentially not a ‘noble’ character) marriage with Hedda was a gift of chance, a stroke of luck to be snatched, like some wish in a fairy tale, before it disappeared. For Hedda (a ‘noble’ character) marriage with Tesman was an act of hubris, whose unlikelihood of success she very well knew before she did it. They, and indeed all characters in the play, are imprisoned in themselves, each in what they are – another of Ibsen’s commonest, iciest themes.

Language

Throughout Hedda Gabler, tightness of form and thematic concentration are balanced by the extraordinary freedom and colloquialism of the language. (The stylistic tension this sets up embodies, in an entirely unforced way, the pull between Apollonian control and Dionysian abandon which underlies the plot.) Only Miss Tesman speaks with an old-fashioned, faintly artificial turn of phrase, as if she were using a language learned from books or samplers rather than from real life. All other characters speak brisk, unambiguous prose whose self-confident slanginess must have fallen like a cold shower on the ears of Ibsen’s first audience. There is no hint of literary stodginess, of the kind sometimes imparted by translators over-respectful of Ibsen’s status as a ‘literary classic’. The language is intentionally ordinary, and its vernacular simplicity gives pace, verve, and opportunity for darkly comic points-scoring and irony. (All characters, even Berta, use irony.)

For all its insouciant appearance, Ibsen handles this continuum of everyday looseness and naturalness of speech with a virtuosity matching his use of form. The rhythms of the dialogue, in both individual characters’ utterances (which reflect the movement, or non-movement, of their minds) and in whole scenes and acts, is precisely controlled. Early 20th-century critics somewhat fancifully compared Hedda Gabler to a symphony.