Sophocles, Hegel and Ibsen

A Perspective on A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People
by Helge Salemonsen

III. Ibsen on his contemporary dramas

      Ibsen emphasises that his last eleven plays, from A Doll’s House (1879) to When We Dead Awaken (1899), have to be considered a continuous chain of stories; they create a unity and are to be seen as an entity, that is, as a cycle. He comments on the subtitle of his last play in an interview with Verdens Gang: That he had called it A dramatical epilogue, he says, did not imply that it should be read as an epilogue to the entirety of his works, but as an epilogue to a particular series of plays, beginning with A Doll’s House:

What I meant by epilogue in this context was merely that this play forms an epilogue to the series of plays, which began with A Doll’s House and now ends with When We Dead Awaken. It completes the chain of experiences I wanted to portray in this series of plays. Together they create a unity and now I am finished with it. If I write anything more it will be in another context, perhaps, too, in another form. (VG, 12. 12. 1899)

      One may wonder why he did not mention Pillars of Society (1877) as a part of this chain of plays. In The Ibsen Cycle Brian Johnston provides good arguments for why we should consider it nevertheless. It would take too long to present this chain of reasoning here.