The German Enlightenment and the drama of ideas.

Recommended subjects for study:
Germany and the displacement of French neo-classicism.

The new drama of Ideas inaugurates modern drama.

Immanuel Kant:‘Critique of Pure Reason,
Lessing: Nathan the Wise:  The Hamburg Dramaturgy
‘Stürm und Drang': Jakob Lenz The Tutor; The Soldiers

The plays of Goethe and Schiller.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Egmont; Torquato Tasso; Iphigenia in Tauris

Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos; Mary Stuart; Wilhelm Tell; Wallenstein
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind’ and other essays.

Recommended:

Heinrich von Kleist, The Prince of Homburg. (Smith & Kraus ISBN: 1575254913)
THEMES:
Historical Consciousness and Dialectical Drama.
‘The Romantic agony of 'authenticity'. Schiller to Ibsen.
Extension of Art and Drama into Space (Nature) and Time (History)
Schiller’s conversion of History into dialectics: “a myth of Reason”.
Individuals as fields of historical forces and conflicts.  ,
Lessing’s drama of Ideas in Nathan the Wise combines with Schiller’s drama of dialectical history.
.

Romantic ‘Journey into the Interior’.  Heinrich von Kleist and the drama of the interior landscape.  The estrangement (alienation) of the individual from the human community.
The transgressive Outsider, Rebel and Criminal as the new hero/heroine of modern consciousness.

Recommended
Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death;

Themes:
Georg Büchner’s and Eugene Scribe's depiction of history as meaningless. Both reject the Schillerian-Hegelian project of meaning in history.:
Scribe's well-made play structure cheerfully exploits the condition that Büchner 'episodic'  drama agonizes over.

Theatre as commodity.  The entertainment industry
The modern cultural division into mainstream and minority drama.

Recommended
To The Third Empire, ‘Brand: The Tragedy of Vocation’
(Univ. of Minnesota, 1980) pp.130-163
‘The Dangerous Seductions of the Past. (Website)

Recommended
To The Third Empire pp.164 207 (‘The Parable of Peer Gynt’)

Theme:
Peer Gynt is arguably the last major modern drama in verse.  Ibsen from now on will transform drama from a rhetorical to an analytical instrument: 

Emperor and Galilean  depicts the drama of Julian the Apostate in Constantinople in the fourth century.  The setting is Western Civilization at its most critical turning point.  The drama is conceived on an epic scale, with some of the most brilliant and vivid scenes in Ibsen’s writing. 
         
Recommended:
Emperor and Galilean, Part II
Johnston: To The Third Empire pp. 224-271

G.W.F.Hegel: The Philosophy of History
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.

Pillars of Society inaugurates Ibsen's 12-play Realist Cycle. The play anticipates themes developed in the plays that follow. The social world of Karsten Bernick, like our own, is materialist. Morality, idealism and spirituality are a cosmetic masking of less ideal motives: until the entry of Lona Hessel. With her Dionysiac entry(indecorous music and circus animals) from America and from the local and the archetypal Past, ('Lona' derives from Apollo) the careful superstructure of the moralizing community collapses with devastating effect. Pillars of Society is as fresh and pertinent as the latest financial and political scandals. 

A Doll House takes place at Christmas, the time of the death of the old year and the birth of the new. . The themes of the play, explore beyond the dimensions of particular social issues with which the play long has been associated. These issues are only one dimension of the rich human drama opened up by the dialectical action.

Recommended:
IBSEN’S SELECTED PLAYS (ISP) cf. Text and Background
THE IBSEN CYCLE esp. pp. 98-186
TEXT AND SUPERTEXT IN IBSEN’S DRAMA pp. 101 –164

G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit Chs. V-VII

(Warning: This is formidably difficult reading!  A primer is recommencded)

In Ghosts, Ibsen presents us with a familiar-seeming image of our reality: a drawing room, characters dressed and acting like the people we know, moving among objects with which we are familiar. Then this reality gradually begins to dissolve. The scenes, characters, action and dialogue, though like everyday life, reveal that what is going on is something bigger than an everyday conflict. Ghosts from Greek drama invade the realistic action. From the opening, we are on haunted ground.  Ghosts caused perhaps the greatest public outrage of any play in the history of drama and was banned from public performance in England for nearly thirty years.

An Enemy of the People.   In this lively political comedy, Dr. Thomas Stockmann is impetuous, indignant, good-natured, ebullient and brave, embodying that "joy of life" invoked but tragically elusive in Ghosts. He also is naive, a little vain, loving attention, and enjoying a good fight if necessary. He is a study of the kind of man who is likely to turn into a Socratic rebel; a likely 'enemy of the people' in any society.

Recommended
THE IBSEN CYCLE pp.189-236
TEXT & SUPERTEXT: 165-191

The Wild Duck is as mysterious as any of Ibsen's plays.  Ibsen invented for the modern theatre one of its major recurring metaphors. The fantasy attic into which the Ekdals retreat from alienated reality anticipates the pipe dreams of Gorky's The Lower Depths or Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh; the escapist medievalism of Pirandello's Henry IV; the illusory worlds to which Tennessee Williams' vulnerable characters retreat; the escapist fantasies of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and of George and Martha in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Ibsen's image of the tragi-comic human condition, in this play, proves its potency as a theatrical metaphor.

Recommended:
Ibsen’s Selected Plays: Text and Background.
The Realism of ‘The Wild Duck’
available online at: www.ibsenvoyages.com/e-texts/duck/

In Rosmersholm, the heroine, the illegitimate Rebecca West, sees herself as an agent of enlightenment combating a world of entrenched traditions, superstitions and social repression. She also is associated with social and sexual transgression.The play sets in opposition two recurring aspects of human history: the conservative and constraining forces of civilization, represented by Rosmer; and, opposed, the forces of life, the instincts, represented by Rebecca West, that seek to overthrow all that denies their fulfillment.

The Lady from the Sea explores a cosmic space: of mountain ranges, of the sea, fjord, sky and stars. From these immensities emerges a mysterious figure, the Stranger, who now returns to claim his faithless wife, Ellida, the heroine of the play.  The play’s conclusion is ambiguous and playgoers have debated it ever since.. The play ends as ambiguous comedy, the sense of immense danger narrowly escaped combined with a sense of immense opportunities and vistas forever lost.

Recommended:
THE IBSEN CYCLE pp. 237-288
TEXT AND SUPERTEXT: pp. 194-233

Hedda Gabler compresses theworld-historical drama Emperor and Galilean into a modern drawing-room.  Tesman, the aunts and Thea Elvsted, abetted by the ambiguous Judge Brack, seem, as Ibsen once explained, like “a strange and hostile power"” threatening the heroine.   Against this respectable bourgeois world, Hedda enlists the scandalous Eilert Løvborg, envisaged with "vine leaves in his hair."  Eilert’s activities, however, involve the disreputable milieu of Miss Diana and her ladies who inhabit the night world of sexual orgy.  The two worlds collide when Løvborg accuses Diana of the crime " killing the child" committed by Hedda. He is shot in Diana's apartment with Hedda's pistol, and Judge Brack threatens Hedda with the possibility of her appearing alongside Diana in court.  Ibsen's stage is haunted by archetypal forces and powers, the reproachful and half-forgotten ghosts shaping our modern identities. 

The action of The Master Builder seems both shocking and simple: a young woman enters the household of a successful architect with the claim that, ten years to the day, he once made love to her when she was 12-13 years old, promising her a 'kingdom' on this very date. Visions of a more transcendent past, present and future ferment the fertile and subversive imaginations of the pair.  An action in which 'youth' from Lysanger ('lys' = light) invades the retreat of an aging figure named after the sun (Sol-ness), at the time of the autumnal equinox (September 19th) and, the next evening gets that figure to ascend and fall against a sun-streaked sky, already reveals less a study  in sexual pathology and more an archetypal supertext.  . The action moves through many dimensions of reality to its ambiguous climax.

Recommended:
THE IBSEN CYCLE pp.288-352
Ibsen’s Selected Plays Text and Background.

cf. Theoharis C. Theoharis, Ibsen’s Drama: Right Action to Tragic Joy  (St.Martin’s Press 1996)

In Little Eyolf, Alfred and Rita Allmers lose their crippled child who is lured to his death by an uncanny figure from folk-legend, the Rat Wife; the parents then descend into a hell of mutual recrimination and estrangement, realizing they neither loved their child nor each other. The play, set in the spring or early summer, depicts sexual passions and their consequences. The action of emotional and psychological devastation is accompanied by a rich visual and verbal imagery that explores powers within the natural world into which the human drama extends. The mysterious and beautiful play concludes invoking the 'spirits' of this cosmos, as if all human elements finally dissolve into it. Little Eyolf has proved a memorable experience in the theatre.

Recommended:
THE IBSEN CYCLE pp.153-169

John Gabriel Borkman is the most strangely 'Gothic' of Ibsen's realist plays while also one of his most 'classic' in structure. It is set in winter, in the north, where the vital passions of the characters are locked in a lethal coldness of the soul. This is a world of the living dead, the Borkman family, in which life impulses have been so vehemently and long repressed, that the elder trio in the play, Borkman, Gunnhild and Ella, actually have created norms out of the condition of insanity; living at a level of manic resentment which keeps a husband and wife, who inhabit the same house, unable to speak to each other for over eight years; and twin sisters, locked in fierce mutual hatred, willing to fight to the death to possess the son of the man they both loved but who destroyed them both. George Bernard Shaw wrote of the play: "This melancholy household of the dead crumbles to dust at the knock of the younger generation at the door.... The fresh air and the light break into the tomb; and its inhabitants crumble into dust."

Ibsen called When We Dead Awaken an 'Epilogue'.. Set in summer, and ending "at dawn, before the sunrise" it concludes the Realist Cycle. The physical action of the play is as simple and as resonant as that of Sophokles' Oedipus at Kolonos. An elderly artist and his young wife arrive at a sanatorium. The artist meets a former model he once loved and abandoned.  The wife meets a 'bear hunter to whom she is fearfully attracted. As in an adulterous quadrille, the foursome divide into two new couples. The scene of the play gradually ascends, act by act, finally to a storm-threatened mountain height. One couple descends to live; the other ascends to die.  James Joyce, reviewing the play, proclaimed: " On the whole, When We Dead Awaken may rank with the greatest of the author's works - if, indeed, it be not the greatest. It is described as the last of the series...a grand epilogue... Than these dramas, excellent alike in dramaturgical skill, characterization and supreme interest, the long roll of drama, ancient or modern, has few things better to show."

Recommended:
THE IBSEN CYCLE pp. 153 -186