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Love's Comedy & Peer Gynt
Introduction by Brian Johnston

            Click here for excerpts from the plays

THE EXISTENTIAL ARGUMENT OF THE PLAY
There is a (probably apocryphal) story that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, walking in a park one night was stopped by a policeman who asked, "Who are you? What are you doing here?": at which the philosopher resonantly replied, "Ah, yes! Those are the questions!" These are the questions Romantic protagonists agonized over. Though Peer Gynt takes a disenchanted view of Romantic aspirations, it is a thoroughly Romantic work. Pre-Romantic drama's ideal had been Integrity; that of Romantic and post-Romantic drama is Authenticity. In the earlier drama an Oedipus, Electra, Hamlet, Othello or Phèdre at least possessed a strong sense of a self ("Who are you?") and a human order that could be seen to be violated and needed to be "set right"; ("What are you doing here?"). Even for Shakespeare's most questioning hero, Hamlet, there was a divinity that shaped our ends, a providence in the fall of a sparrow. In death, Hamlet could ask Horatio to "report me and my cause aright/To the unsatisfied". In his (presumably) last moments Peer has neither self nor cause to be reported aright: only the failure to discover either self or cause. There is a direct path from Romantic literature and drama like Peer Gynt to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. And, for that matter, to the movie Citizen Kane, whose hero, like Peer, learns it does not profit a man to gain he whole world if he loses his own soul. It is the basis of the quest beneath Ibsen's later Cycle of twelve plays, setting out twelve stages of the same mutual exploration of world and human identity. The most familiar example, for American audiences, is that of Nora Helmer in A Doll House, brought to the realization she knows neither who she is nor what world she is living in.

The idea that one's 'self' and the world it finds itself in, are both equally unknown entities: that the self is a project, only, to be realized, authentically or otherwise, removes all sense of abiding normality, a set of certainties against which the human drama can be played. Peer finds himself confronting what Jean Paul Sartre stated was the essence of the existential condition:

Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is only
what he wills himself to be after this first thrust towards existence.
Man in nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first
principle of existentialism [5]

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5. J.P. Sartre, "Existentialism and Human Emotion," Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. From the French by Annette Michelson (London: Rider,) 1955.