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Love's Comedy & Peer Gynt
Introduction by Brian Johnston

            Click here for excerpts from the plays

'ARCHETYPAL' ELEMENTS IN THE PLAY
Peer Gynt invokes not only Romantic drama but such archetypal forms as the Quest myth, in which (in Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, the Oedipus story, Beowulf), the hero leaves home, travels extensively through the world performing heroic actions, meets monstrous and divine beings, descends to the underworld and returns at last to his native home, often with some magic possession or knowledge that might redeem the wasteland his home has become. Peer follows, even if in parody, this quest pattern. He leaves home; is outcast; travels over an extensive land-and-seascape; journeys underground (the troll sequence); speaks with monstrous and phantasmal figures; like Oedipus, encounters the Sphinx; and returns, in old age, to a wasteland where his wife, like Odysseus's Penelope, is faithfully waiting. He returns, however, with no healing wisdom, which alerts us to yet another 'absent presence'; for while continually invoking, he also has negated, the redemptive purpose of the quest myth.

This 'circuitous journey', M.H. Abrams reminds us [6] often was linked, in Romantic poetry, with the parable of the Prodigal Son:

The Bible contained an apt, detailed and impressive figure of life as a circular rather than a linear journey, which had been uttered explicitly as a parable of Man's sin and redemption, and by the authoritative voice of Jesus himself. This was the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32) who collected his inheritance and "took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living:; then, remorseful, made his way back to his homeland and the house of his father, who joyously received him, clothed him in the best robe, a ring and shoes, and ordered the fatted calf that they might "eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." [7]

Like the other 'absent presences' in the play, the parable reproaches the text that traduces it. In Act V. the play also takes on the aspect of a Morality Play, such as Everyman, where the hero is summoned to confront allegorical images of his past before preparing for his imminent death.

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6. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, (New York: Norton, 1971) p. 165
7. ibid.