|
|
Introduction to Love's
Comedy LOVE’S COMEDY, published in 1862, is Ibsen’s first play of contemporary social life.[1] He brings to an end the long recreation of the Norwegian past, from Viking times to the present, undertaken in his previous plays.[2] This multi-layered cultural past, mythic, historical, archetypal and ideological, made up something of a communal Unconscious underlying and shaping modern consciousness,. It would expand into the large-scaled conflict of EMPEROR AND GALILEAN [3] and permeate 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 intense 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, finally renouncing each other in ecstatic anguish. 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 (the ‘Idea’ to be realized by ‘Life’) and how things actually are in the ‘alienated’ world we have created around us and actually have to live in. This in fact, is the fundamental conflict of modern dialectical drama, too: in e.g. George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean Genet. It is the idea (also expressed by Shaw in Man and Superman) of conventional and fashionable society as Hell: 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 that the play was not performed and, in fact it still waits for a production that could decide on whether or not it would ‘work’ in the theater, as I am convinced it would [5]. 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 well 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”. [6] 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, and I am convinced a satisfactory performance style could be worked out. The time is past when actors simply gave up when confronted with non-Shakespearean verse and rushed at it in the hope of making it sound like prose. Richard Wilbur’s translation of Moliere’s couplets into their English equivalents has demonstrated that this is more effective, dramatically, than prose or free verse translations. We should not too quickly despair of an audience’s capacity for pleasure in accomplished artifice in the theater In many ways, Love's Comedy fulfills George Bernard Shaw’s ideal of “the discussion play” for, 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 confrontation, it should be possible to create an effective performance style for it
The theme and story of the play will be repeated in subsequent drama: notably in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida; while the consequences of its denouement can be found, perhaps, in HEedda Gabler. Ellida Wangel, Hedda Gabler and Candida Morell follow the example of Svanhild, (relinquishing the possibility of romantic love with the rebellious poet Falk, and settling for the humdrum of quiet domestic love with the merchant, Guldstad) with similarly ambivalent dutifulness. The anguished attraction and renunciation in both Love's Comedy and The Lady from the Sea are enacted against a challenging background of Nature: of mountain heights and implied seascape, the imagery of which powerfully infiltrates the dialogue. In typically Romantic terms, this natural imagery is employed as a weapon against the world of alienated and institutionalized society and, in this play, is notably linked to a strain of imagery of rebellion taken from the Bible. These two sources of imagery, natural and biblical (from Old and New Testaments) make the comedy in the drawing room into a cultural battlefield – another anticipation of the later realist plays, where the imagery will be developed into a more complex and multi-layered dialectic. All Ibsen’s plays stage a battle of competing poetics, a struggle to assert the dominant language of the play in a clash of concepts and imagery; where key phrases as well as ideas engage in combat for control of the play’s discourse. At stake in this procedure is Ibsen’s bid to establish his own evolving, subversive poetics within his culture. In Love's Comedy this dialectic within the language itself is most evident. Falk and Svanhild proclaim, and sustain, against the approved discourse of their society, the counter discourse of painful authenticity, of maintaining the idea of romantic love against all contamination by the ‘spirit of compromise’- as it will be called in Brand Their language is assailed on all sides by the language of compromise; 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 but inexorably tragic process of everyday life: declining beauty, strength, mental faculties and health. If such love is to remain a challenge and reproach to the fallen world it must protect its own integrity through renunciation of the values of the world. The counter-value of such an ideal that cannot be hurt by the world’s vicissitudes resembles that of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
love
is not love Shakespeare dramatized the same dialectic of love in his three love tragedies. The lovers who die too young for disillusion in Romeo and Juliet, are destroyed 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.
With the sole exception of St. John’s Night (1853) which, however, contains too many fantastic elements to be considered strictly a drama of contemporary life. |
|
 |
|
