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The Ibsen Cycle

  The Design of thePlays from
  Pillars of Society to
  When We Dead Awaken

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The 12-Play Cycle
Ibsen's own account of his plays insisted they made up a "Cycle" with "mutual connections between the plays" which, he further enjoined, should be read in the order in which they were written.  In THE IBSEN CYCLE, I follow Ibsen's injunction, showing how the sequence of twelve plays from Pillars of Society to the 'Epilogue' When We Dead Awaken, are connected as a single, ambitious artwork of complex design.   Pillars of Society inaugurates the Cycle and is pregnant with themes, images, archetypes and characters from our cultural past that evolve dialectically throughout the Cycle.  Conceiving a work of art on such a scale was typical of the nineteenth century. Ibsen's Cycle, completed in the last year of that century, is an epilogue, also, to a long sequence of human history.  Ibsen insisted the age in which he lived was a 'closure' from which would emerge new categories for living of which he and his contemporaries could have no idea.  When We Dead Awaken gives no hint of what that 'rough beast, its hour come round at last' will be: but the aftershocks from the cultural tremors created by the plays are still felt over a century later.

The scale and complexity of the Cycle offer rewards to both the reader and playgoer.The plays have a double life: collectively as the collection of books on the shelf awaiting exploration, analysis and research as with similarly ambitious classics; and an altogether different life individually as exciting performances in the theater generating excitement in audiences probably with no previous knowledge of Ibsen.  In continual path-breaking productions worldwide, Ibsen's plays have proved their theatrical vitality: while international publications and 'Ibsen conferences' - also worldwide - are evidence of a flourishing Ibsen academic industry. These two dimensions of Ibsen's enduring artistic significance, the scholarly and the theatrical, ideally will continue to feed off each other.  Theatrical interpretations and adaptations of the plays reveal to scholars often unsuspected dimensions and remind Ibsen scholars of the intense life of the individual moments of the Cycle: each play in the Cycle pulses with its own life, its own unique images, characters, actions and themes.  Awareness of the scale of the Cycle as a totality can give the experience of an individual play an awareness of its part in a major artistic project. "Only by reading my entire production as a continuous and coherent whole will the reader be able to receive the precise impression I sought to convey in the individual parts of it"  wrote Ibsen in 1898, laying upon the reader a laborof the imagination that, as with other masterworks, will be wonderfully rewarded.

A good way to begin fathoming the nature of this "continuous and coherent " totality is to see the individual plays of the Cycle as completing a conscious design.  There is nothing new in this claim for an artistic or literary project: it has been the goal of many artists, beginning with the epic poems of Homer. The twelve plays of the Cycle form a tripartite unity with four plays to each group. Each group has its own design, with striking parallels, contrasts, 'mutual connections' and symmetries of arabesque complexity within the Cycle's dialectical evolution from the first play to the last. 

Pillars of Society
A Doll House
Ghosts
An Enemy of the People

The Wild Duck
Rosmersholm
The Lady from the Sea
Hedda Gabler

The Master Builder
Little Eyolf
John Gabriel Borkman
When We Dead Awaken

The First Group: Pillars of Society; A Doll House; Ghosts; An Enemy of the People
The first group forms a structure of symmetrical parallels and contrasts that is the procedure, also, of the second and third groups. For a more complete account of this procedure see 'The Structure of the Cycle' in TheIbsenCycle, (pp. 98 - 186). An idea of the design of the whole Cycle can be gauged by looking at that of the first group.

Two 'outer' plays open and close the group, the last play of the group preparing for the evolution to the second group.  Two 'inner plays explore other dimensions of the dialectic. The two outer plays, Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People show striking parallels. The titles of the two plays suggest the dialectical journey that has been traveled by the leading male role: from established pillar in the first play to ostracised enemy in the last.

The contrasting leading figures are male: the 'pillar of society', KarstenBernick and the enemy of society, Thomas Stockman.   In both plays there are notable crowd scenes of major public occasion. Both plays focus on the public and social aspect of our humanity and are noisy and confrontational. Both end with a tableau of the hero isolated from his society but surrounded by his family.

The two 'inner' plays concentrate on the family separate from its social scene. They show a similar symmetry. Here, the leading figures are female - Nora Helmer and Helene Alving; and both plays are notably domestic and 'interior' in imagery and subject matter, suitable to the themes of marriage and the family. 'Nora' is a diminutive of 'Eleanora' - an alternative form of "Helen', suggesting a link between the two heroines.

The final play of this group, An Enemy of the People concluding this tetralogy with its predominantly 'Greek' dialectic, themes and imagery and begins, especially in the last Act, to introduces the 'Christian' dialectic, themes and imagery of the second group beginnijng with The Wild Duck.  Thus each group ends with the closure of a phase and the anticipation of the new phase to follow.  The dialectic of the Cycle is continuous, from the first play to the 'epilogue'.(That this is also the dialectical procedure of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit need not be dwelt upon at this monment).

The Second Group: The Wild Duck; Rosmersholm; The Lady from the Sea; Hedda Gabler
The opening and closing plays of this second group, The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler, also reveal striking parallels. In both we find interior scenes divided between a foreground room associated with work and everyday reality, and a more secretive and escapist background room: a visual dualism that is extended into a wide-ranging psychological, social, and metaphysical dualism detectable in the imageryof the plays. There are many curious parallels.  Both plays, uniquely in the cycle, are punctuated by two pistol shots, and in both, the similarly names heroines, Hedvig-Hedda, retreat to the background room to shoot themselves. Lieutenant Ekdal dons full dress uniform to stand over the body of Hedvig, and Hedda is discovered beneath the portrait of her uniformed father, General Gabler. In both plays Hjalmar Ekdal and Jørgen Tesman have been brought up by two maiden aunts.   In both households there is a cynical and controlling ('satanic') neighbor, Relling and Judge Brack.

The two inner plays, Rosmersholm; The Lady from the Sea also have themes and imagery in common. In a first draft of the play, the priest, Rosmer was given the two daughters now transferred to Wangel.   Both male characters have a deceased wife in the background and a wayward and mysterious partner in the present. Rebecca West, from northern Finnmark is termed a 'mermaid', 'sea troll', and 'witch', while the mermaid-like Ellida Wangel was referred to as 'the pagan' by 'an old priest'.

Hedda Gabler retreats to her inner room, curtained off from the curtained living room, to shoot herself to escape the loss of freedom threatened by Judge Brack. The time of year is the Fall - the time of year in which the first play of the third group opens. The Master Builder begins in the same condition of entrapment, of loss of freedom as Hedda Gabler, and the stage set is again divided between foreground and background rooms in the first act only, in the Master Builder: as the precondition for a dynamic of liberation from intolerable confinement.

The Third Group The Master Builder: Little Eyolf; John Gabriel Borkman; When We Dead Awaken

The opening and closing plays, The Master Builder; When We Dead Awaken dramatize the agons of the leading characters as artists (Masterbuilder Solness; Sculptor Rubek).  Each is burdened and constrained by past guilt and finally breaks free for exultantly assertive but fatal actions of ascent and fall. The actions of each play are instigated by 'unexpected visitors' from the past to whom promises were made, and who lure the artists 'upward' to their deaths.

The two inner plays, Little Eyolf; John Gabriel Borkman portray marriages torn apart by conflicts in the past  - repeated in the present - over the possession and loss of the younger generation.

These last four plays of the Cycle reveal, in succession a distinct evolutionary sequence. The last act endings show a clear progression from evening to dawn while the scenography of last act endings reveals an equally clear pattern of ascent within an ever-expanding natural scene. Ibsen is a meticulous artist where each detail represents an intention. Our interpretation of the individual plays and of the Cycle as a whole cannot begin to be adequate - or serious - until we engage with these structural as well as metaphoric dimensions of his art.  

The following diagram can best set out the structure and design of this last group: