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Love's
Comedy & Peer Gynt Click here for excerpts from the plays Love's Comedy Love's Comedy (1862) is Ibsen's first play of contemporary social life. [1] He ends the series that, in reverse order, resurrected and explored the Norwegian past, from the present (St. John's Night,1853) through renaissance (Lady Inger of Ostraat, 1855) medieval (The Feast at Solhoug;1856 Olaf Likliekrans, 1857) to Viking and saga times (The Vikings at Helgeland, 1858) undertaken in his previous plays [2]. This multi-layered cultural past, mythic, historical, ideological, made up something of an archaeology of the national unconscious underlying and shaping modern Norwegian consciousness. This was the program Ibsen advocated inhis early critical and theoretical writings: on the value of resurrecting the still living mythic and cultrural past in modern literature. This program would expand into the large-scaled world-conflict of Emperor and Galilean and will shape the Cycle of modern plays that followed. Love's Comedy also inaugurated another persistent feature of Ibsen's career: it was greeted with outrage and hostility by the critics and the public who were incensed at its unnerving thesis that romantic love and conventional marriage were fundamentally incompatible. Ibsen's paradoxical lovers, Falk and Svanhild, go at the theme with dialectical rigor and Romantic ardor, in an ecstatic anguish opf renunciation. This paradox was too much for the Norway of the 1860's and the play was rejected by the theaters. Even worse, it aggravated the social ostracism Ibsen already was enduring. Behind the love theme is the more radical Romantic one of the inevitable opposition between how things authentically should be and how things actually are in the 'alienated' world we have created around us and have to live in. 'Alienation' is the fundamental conflict of modern dialectical drama: in e.g. George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean Genet. It is the idea (expressed by Shaw in Man and Superman) of conventional and fashionable society as Hell: a theme explicitly (and jauntily) stated by the hero Falk in Act III where he tells Svanhild that the upholders of conventional society and its values who have banished him and are celebrating socially approved weddings, …think
they are gods, or Croesus, rich and wise; The hostile critical reception ensured the play was not performed. As far as I know, it still awaits a production that could decide whether or not it 'works' in the theater, as I am convinced it would. The problem, for a modern audience, obviously is the highly elaborate rhymed-verse structure. The medium of rhymed verse sustains the characters and action of the play at a level of highly self-conscious artifice, which cannot translate into prose without removing something like the oxygen the characters breathe. Even free verse translation would have to forsake the high spirited energy with which all the characters collude in keeping up the intricate, omnipresent demands of the rhyme medium, a subtle imperative by which they are all constrained as if by a code of exquisite manners. They were conceived to live and move and have their being within such a medium and would not survive being transplanted into another. Michael Meyer, in his biography of Ibsen, notes the play's "extreme formalism" where the characters engage in bouts of epigram which makes it seem "as if written by a modern Alexander Pope". [4] Any production would need to accept this epigrammatic formalism; a formalism that is no more pronounced than that, for example, of Moliere's The Misanthrope or Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. I am convinced a satisfactory performative style could be worked out. The time is past, one hopes, when actors simply give up when confronted with verse, or hope to make it sound like prose. Richard Wilbur's translations of Moliere's couplets into their English equivalents has demonstrated this is more effective, dramatically, than prose or free verse translations. We should not despair of an audience's capacity for pleasure in accomplished artifice in the theater. In many ways, Love's Comedy fulfills Shaw's ideal of "the discussion play." Like Shaw's own Getting Married, it consists almost entirely of brilliant discussion from beginning to end. The central event in Act II, for example, is not an action, but Falk's extended analogy of Love and Tea and the discussion that follows, leading to Falk' expulsion from the 'false Eden' of the Halm house and garden. If one accepts that Love's Comedy is a play of verbal rather than physical confrontations, it should be possible to create an effective performance style. THE THEME OF THE PLAY
IN LATER DRAMA All Ibsen's plays stage a battle of competing vocabularies, a struggle to assert the dominant language of the play in a clash of concepts and imagery; where key phrases as well as ideas combat for control of the play's discourse. At stake is Ibsen's bid to establish his own subversive poetics within his culture. In Love's Comedy this dialectic is evident. Falk and Svanhild proclaim, and sustain, the language of a painful authenticity, maintaining the ideal of romantic love against all contamination by the 'spirit of compromise'- as it will be called in Brand. Their quest is assailed on all sides by the language of compromise, and the conflict reaches its climax in Act III in the scene of the three tempters, Styver, Stråmand and Guldstad. Svanhild describes Styver and Stråmand as two "evil tempters" (onde fristere) : one denying that authentic love can survive the material riches of the world, the other denying it can survive ceaseless penury. Guldstad, the third and most formidable tempter, is the one the lovers' did not anticipate. He tells them he has come to cast off his "disguise" in order to confront them with his devastating challenge: that the only way to preserve love in all its idealist authenticity is to renounce it utterly: for such a love can never survive contamination from the banal realities of everyday life: the gradual loss of beauty, strength, mental faculties and health. If such love is to remain an ideal challenge and reproach to the fallen world it must protect its own integrity through renunciation of the world. The value of such an ideal that cannot be hurt by the world's vicissitudes resembles that of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: …love is not loveShakespeare dramatized the same dialectic of love in his three love tragedies. The lovers who die too young for disillusion in Romeo and Juliet, are devastated by the world's process as Troilus and Cressida; they mutually re-assert the fiction of love triumphant against the world as Antony and Cleopatra, a fiction that ultimately can be sustained only in suicide. Love's Comedy, written by Ibsen at about the same age as Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, seems already to anticipate that disillusioning process. 1.
St. John's Night (1853)perhaps contains too many fantastic elements
to be considered strictly a drama of contemporary life. |
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