• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

Romanticism to Realism
an online course by Brian Johnston

THE PRETENDERS

THE EARLY PLAYS

Ibsen's early dramas to Love's Comedy and The Pretenders.

         After writing his first two plays, Catiline and The Warriors Barrow Ibsen was appointed the equivalent of artistic director of the new Norwegian theatre in Bergen.  Until then, theatre in Norway had been performed by Danish theatre groups.  The purpose for the new theater was to establish a drama of Norwegian national identity and consciousness.  This was part of a general trend in Europe for nations emerging from foreign domination, from the Balkans and Scandinavia to Ireland, to establish national theaters.  

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            In To The Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Drama, (University of Minnesota Press 1980) I offer an account of Ibsen's early plays up to the writing of Emperor and Galilean. The series that ended with The Pretenders, I contended, create an archaeology of the Norwegian past as Ibsen’ sets about tracing in  reverse-order Norwegian history. The series travels from the Ibsen's time (St. John's Night,1853) through the Renaissance (Lady Inger of Ostraat, 1855) to Medieval (The Feast at Solhoug (1856) and Olaf Likliekrans, 1857) and finally to Viking and Saga times (The Vikings at Helgeland, 1858).  This multi-layered cultural past, mythic, historical, ideological, trace the evolution of national-historical identity unconsciously shaping modern Norwegian consciousness.  Ibsen advocated this program in critical and theoretical writings that insisted on the value of resurrecting the still living mythic and cultrural past in modern literature. (See The Dangerous Seductions of the Past in this Ibsen Course.)

This program then expands into the large-scaled world-conflict of Emperor and Galilean that concludes this first half of Ibsen’s career and that will shape the Cycle of modern plays that followed.  Cultural nationalism, for Ibsen, was a means to enlarge the subject of dramatic art. – to expand the dimensions of the dramatic action in order to create a historical consciousness in the theatre audience: to bring the past to life on his stage in the form of historical costume dramas.  The exploration the cultural layers that went into the making of Norwegian identity and that of his own self would be a mutual self-discovery carried out by poet and audience.    These were the essential conditions for a major new dramatic art.  Ibsen never sacrificed these dimensions of his dramatic goal: in the Realist Cycle, the dormant cultural past, now immensely expanded, is recovered beneath the surface of modern reality.

After a frustrating series of failures in his own plays, (while the public still demanded “Scribe & Co.’S sugar-candy confections) Ibsen, with a wife and infant son, was financially bankrupt.  The public continued to be hostile to him, especially after Love's Comedy (1862) his first major play.  The Pretenders (1864), however, was a success..  Ibsen was thirty six years old.  That year he left Norway, never resettling until nearly thirty years later.  Therefore, for most of his career in which he wrote the plays that made him famous, Ibsen, like his disciple James Joyce, chose exile.

THE PRETENDERS. 
The Pretenders is Ibsen's last national historical play.  Brand and  Peer Gynt are set in the modern world, and are far from flattering the Norwegian identity.  Emperor and Galilean describes a world-historical, not a national, identity.

 SCENE.

           The Pretenders takes place in Norway between 1170 and 1240 when Norway was still Viking but recently Christian.  It was a fragmented country of competing chiefs like Earl Skule.  Haakon's 'world-historical destiny' is to the agent of Norway's national unity. The 'hero' of the play, however, is Earl Skule, who fails, but whose failure helps Haakon's cause.   ( Emperor and Galilean. will enlarge this theme to the world-stage with Julian as another such 'victim of the cunning of Reason.)

         The play is skillfully constructed.  Ibsen has learned from Scribe to maintain audience interest by a series of reversals of fortune for the two main protagonists.  But he takes dramatic plotting beyond the Scribean range and much closer to the Schillerean model, even though the Norwegian scene of The Pretenders, while perhaps psychologically more compelling, provides a less ambitious account of historical identity than Don Carlos or Mary Stuart..   Ibsen was so concerned to be true to the actual history (unlike Schiller) that he included much that he himself recognized would need to be cut in performance. 

         The 'emblematic' opening scene with its competing groups creates a symbolic as well as realistic tableau of Church, Monarchy, People.  What is being battled out between the two protagonists is the mind of Norway itself: its conservative, retrogressive, reactionary nature represented by Earl Skule versus its 'forward looking' destiny represented in Haakon.  The scene of the play, therefore, is that of a nation consciousness in the making where the decisions of individual characters will affect national identity.  In this opening, the two competing leaders and their followers face each other from opposite sides of the stage.  The crowd is tense and something is going on in the cathedral which we cannot see, but which agitates the crowd.  Ibsen places us in the same tense situation of wondering, with the crowd, whether Inga will pass the test of the white hot iron.

         The sudden burst of sound (the Gloria in excelsis deo! ) will startle and excite the theater audience.   However, as the play develops, we see that the appearance of this splendid unity is riddled with contradictions.  The Church is led by a corrupt Bishop.  The crowd waiting for the test of Inga will break into disunity and conflict.  What we notice about this dramatic method, is its realism: placing before us an action that convinces us by its human plausibility as well as by its poetic ‘idea’..  Here, I think, is where Ibsen's method advances over Schiller's.  His dramatic method finds its symbolism within the people, things and actions of everyday reality. .” Ibsen brings the ideologicall drama of Schiller closer to the rhythms of our experience of life.

CHARACTER: 

       The Pretenders explores historical events in terms of plausible human consciousness.  The theme of the play is ''fitness for leadership'.”  Haakon is someone who simply has 'the right stuff' and Earl Skule, for all his gifts, lacks this mysterious gift.  This fitness for the task is bound up far more with individual character than in Schiller's plays.  Ibsen shows how characters generate their actions from their inmost wills.   Haakon, Bishop Nicholas and Earl Skule represent three conflicting beliefs as to how principles for living manifest themselves in the world.  Haakon is the 'lucky' man that Nicholas describes: what Hegel saw as the 'world-historical hero' - an Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, who seems to be at the right place at the right time and so changes the world.   Bishop Nicholas is all that holds back the advance of truth and freedom in the world: to live inauthentically, exploiting instead of transcending, the world's divisions.  Earl Skule is the honorable victim of the world-spirit, the mistaken and defeated one whose defeat ensures the victory of the right principle.  By opposing Haakon and exacerbating the divisions of Norway, Skule exemplifies why these divisions must be overcome.  Each of these characters is given a distinct dramatic identity, a stage presence which is humanly plausible and at the same time ideological.

ACTION (PLOT)

         The play dramatizes the evolution of a nation through the dialectical conflict of two opposing principles.  Skule represents the old factious feudalism, preventing Norway’s unification; Haakon, stands for the new unifying principle of monarchy.  Nicholas , the narrow visioned opportunist, is the one who ensures that the two contenders remain in conflict.  Out of this opposition the new Norway will emerge, uniting old loyalties under the new order.

         By now Ibsen has learned the technioque of keeping up dramatic interest and suspense.  In Act Two, for example, the scheming Bishop Nicholas reveals that Haakon might not be the legitimate king (switched as an infant) and that there is a letter that will prove this.  Both the audience and Earl Skule hover tensely for the answer from Nicholas who is about to impart the crucial information, only to be interrupted by the King's entrance.   There is urgent action around another unseen letter, leading to a crisis.   This Scribean intrigue is an awkward drop from the higher interests of the drama but the characterization is richer and deeper than Scribe; the suspense and the conflicts derive from significant clashes of character and purpose.  As we watch Nicholas try to manipulate Earl Skule, we see how the Earl stands for negative and destructive opposition to what Haakon stands for. The issues are more serious, and more seriously rendered, than in, say, Scribe's The Glass of Water.

          More than Schiller, Ibsen internalizes objective conflicts: here the conflicts of the vision that seeks to create a new idea of national unity (Haakon) and the vision that is rooted in the past which flourishes in factionalism.  Ibsen creates a new dramatic psychology out of dialectical conflict - as he will do to a much greater degree in Emperor and Galilean.  This psychology is cultural: men and women come to embody, as personal characteristics, the conflicting impulses and ideologies of their time, fragmented into separate conflicting characters. Ibsen's dramatic actions are more subtly and deeply rooted in his characters’ psyches than they are in Schiller.  His dramatic psychology is convincingly individual and universal.

DIALOGUE

         For a number of years Ibsen alternated between verse and prose drama, settling decisively and permanently for prose with Emperor & Galilean.  In The Pretenders it seems he wants his audience to be involved in the action in an 'immediate' way.  Verse, as in Brand  and Peer Gynt would have distance' the drama in the manner of Mary Stuart.  There is an advantage in distancing: we can see the universal dialectic more clearly. Brand and Peer Gynt  were 'parables' - stories which declare their universal meanings.  The heroes of the two plays exist in a medium very different from ours, are larger than life, and are motivated more by what they represent in the play's argument.  But with the immediate method, as in The Pretenders, we have a different kind of advantage - that of getting close to and intimately understanding how individual wills struggle to their decisions.  Instead of being larger than life, the characters seem like us,  as if we, too,  could participate in their decisions and actions.  They are often confused, like us, (as Earl Skule and his son are).  Ibsen has not yet perfected his dramatic dialogue but he is moving towards that perfection. .  At its best Ibsen's dialogue will be a probing, searching instrument: with hesitations, pauses,  incomplete sentences and phrases,  interrogations: - a dramatization of the immediately and intimately engaged spirit.  The play has a great deal of Schiller's seriousness, a big theme, though not the international-historical scale of Schiller.  And it has the clever plot manipulations of Scribe; not as mechanical, but still getting in the way of the pure drama Ibsen is striving towards.  The Pretenders is the last expression of Ibsen's Norwegian nationalism which he abandoned despite the play's popularity.

         It was also the last play Ibsen was to write for the theater for fourteen years, except for one brilliant intrigue political comedy, The League of Youth.  His next three major plays are Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean in which Ibsen is searching out a huger imaginative space for his dramatic art.  After this exploration, he returns to the theater with a twelve-play modern realist cycle filled with the ghosts of the past. The play obviously is written by a distinguished young dramatist, who has not yet found a way out of the Sribean machinations of nineteenth-century theatre plot-making.

Act One: Scene One

Outside the Bergen Church: the test of Inga to establish Haakon's legitimacy for the throne.One one side, the followers of Haakon: on the other, those of Skule.

There is a perpetual going to a fro between the two contesting parties, Bishop Nicholas helping to keep the conflict going.

Act One: Scene Two

Inside: the Palace. The women, Ragnhild, Skule's wife, Margaret, Skule's daughter, Sigrid. Ragnhild and Margaret, watch and comment on the contested inauguration of Haakon. Haakon enters and claims Margaret as his wife. This action is to join the opposing factions of Haakon and Skule, but it will fail, and make Margaret tragically divided. Haakon is king but Skule has power (214)   Already the serious national-historical themes (of division and unity) have been sounded upon which the rest of the play will be built. What is 'Scribean' is the way the action 'gets going', setting up plot and counter-plot, particularly with the Bishop operating the well-made-play machinery.

Act Two: Scene: Banqueting Hall in Bergen.

Characters: Mingled company of Hakon's and Skule's men - a fragile unity. The dialogue always teertering on the edge of quarrelling.  The three women, Margaret, Ragnhild and Sigrid also nervously present.

Action: Skule uses the royal seal to permit a ship to sail. The Bishop stirs up trouble between Haakon and Skule (Scribean plot). Skule muses on his fate to be always missing royal legitimacy. The Bishop encourages his discontent (more Scribean plotting), pronounces that it is 'luck' that determines success (somewhat like Bolingbroke in The Glass of Water) and encourages Skule to have a robust conscience "beyond good and evil." To encourage him, he sows doubt about Haakon's legitimacy: the babies switched at birth (Scribean plotting) and mentions a "revealing letter" (The Scribean incriminating thing.)  Just before he can say where the letter he is, they are interrupted (Scribean turn of events).  Enter Hakon furious about Skule's use of the seal and orders its return. Conflict becomes open. Sigird foretells dreadful future for Norway. Bishop promises to show letter and lays ground for future Scribean complications.

ACT III Scene Bishop's Palace in Oslo.

Characters. Dying Bishop, monks, Peter Paul Flida.

This act provides a revelation of Nichoals' character: the innately cowardly man who yet intrigued his way to power.

The death of Bishop Nicholas is excellent grim comedy, despite the fussy Scribean intrigue over the letter. In contrast to Schiller, Ibsen has a good sense of satiric comedy: as in such plays as Ghosts and Hedda Gabler. The bishop, his palace, the monks and their prayers for Nicholas, are all distortions of authentic spirituality, the ways spirit gets institutionalized and falsified. The comedy therefore comes from the disparity between the pious outward ceremonies of monks praying for Nicholas, and the actual cynicism of the bishop himself. This is the best Act in the play and its multilayered tragicomic nature is an indication of Ibsen's new power as a dramatist.   The Bishop announces his creation of the perpetuum mobile of disunity to vitiate Norway's future

ACT III ii.

Here one sees a problem with the "historical play": to be faithful to history Ibsen must be false to dramatic form and shaping (a problem with Shakespeare's Histories). Brand is perfectly shaped for its theme: each detail is a vital aspect of it. So it is, also, in Mary Stuart where Schiller is as free as Aeschylus with historical details. But much in The Pretenders seems drawn out, repetitive, because Ibsen is being true to the historical facts.

Act IV.i. Oslo Palace: Skule in control.

Something of a 'genre piece' - recreating a modern's idea of medieval Norway, its skald and warriors. Skule has temporarily bested Haakon but he and his followers stay stuck in the past "because it has always been so."(254)

The dialogue with Jatgeir, the skald: 255-258 full of "good stuff"on being or not being the man of destiny: but there is still something not quite satisfactory in realistically miming history: I think it's a problem with the genre of historical drama, unless, like Shakes and Schiller, it does not try to be 'accurate'. Arrival of Ingeborg and Peter and alliance of Father and Son. Ibsen is being very free with historical facts. Skule steals Haakon's idea of Norwegian unity and coverts his son to it.

 Act Four Scene Two A Street in Oslo

Skule and Haakon meet on the battlefield. Skule threatens to kill Haakon's son and Haakon pronounces a death sentence on Skule.

Haakon gains the upper hand. Skule claims he will kill Haakon's son and Haakon condemns Skule to death. He tells this to Margaret, Skule's daughter, and she accepts.

ACT FIVE

V.i. Palace at Nidaros (267- Skule in flight. The priests refuse to bring the shrine into the square to legitimize Skule as King. (Skule's problem is his need for 'outward' signs).His son, Peter, takes the initiative and seizes the shrine but this appalls Skule and his followers, who now retreat in terror.V.ii. Haakon's triumph, greeted by cheering citizens of Nidaros. The hunt is now on to kill Skule..

Act Five Scene Three waits behind to 'catch' Skule. It is the ghost of Bishop Nicholas! .

Skule, Peter and followers, encounter Queen Margaret and her infant son, accompanied by monks. Meanwhile, one monk

 Skule in flight. Peter decides to kidnap Haakon's son. Bishop Nicholas appears to Skule. Ibsen is dragging in his metaphysical dimension in defiance of his method. Yet from now on this dimension will be integrated successfully into all his drama, starting with his next play, Brand. And Skule's 'satanic' aspect will travel all through his realist plays as well as Peer Gynt.

At best, we can see Bishop Nicholas as a figment of Skule's disordered imagination - though this is not how Ibsen presents him. In fact, to make sure we don't doubt, he has the bishop's ghost address the theater audience! This encounter with the satanic shows Skule his way of salvation (p. 279) as he overcomes this last temptation.

St. Stephen's Abbey. Ragnhild, Sigrid, Margaret, prince, Peter, Skule. The fragmented family re-united for the death of thefather and son. Death of Skule and Peter. The death of Skule cements the idea of unity represented by Haakon. Skule's very opposition served that cause by making the need for unity urgently apparent, not an 'abstract' idea in Haakon's mind.

Peter is impelled to an extreme of blasphemy. Skule disillusions him about the origins of the idea of Norwegian Unity. Father and son decide to expiate all sins and go to their deaths. Haakon pronounces an obituary over Skule.

It was the last play Ibsen was to write for the theater for fourteen years, apart from one political comedy, 'The League ofYouth'. His next three major plays are 'Brand', 'Peer Gynt', and 'Emperor and Galilean' in which Ibsen searched out a larger imaginative space for his dramatic art. After this, he returns to the theater with the twelve-play modern Realist Cycle filled with the ghosts of the past

'The Pretenders' is written by a distinguished poetic mind, a great young dramatist, who has not yet found a way out of the Sribean machinations of nineteenth-century theatre plot-making.. But that is about to change

   From The Pretenders to Brand.

Ibsen burning bridges.

      With The Pretenders Ibsen scored a success with the Norwegina public and proved he could write serious nationalist drama better than anyone. He used the devices of the well-made-play better than Scribe, while combining this method with the serious idea of history of Schiller. If Ibsen could write successfully in this way and please his public, why did he totally abandon the form of the national historical drama? In The Pretenders, Earl Skule is warned to "burn his bridges" when trying to attain power: to have no place to fall back to, so that he will be forced to advance.  (Emperor Julian will follow this policy).   This seemed to have been the philosophy behind Ibsen's career as a dramatist.  Once he succeeded in a dramatic form he had to advance, to find a new form.  And it was Love's Comedy, rather than The Pretenders, that pointed the way. Love's Comedy is a modern play in verse that creates its own 'extended metaphor' out of the elements of Scene, Character, Action and Dialogue.  It sets out the 'problem of love and marriage' in modern society.  To do this, it creates the appropriate characters who represent various approaches to love, from the young rebel, Falk and his lover, Svanhild, to the couples who learn to compromise the claims of love for those of social acceptance, careers and respectability.  When the hero, Falk, leaves conventional society and journeys into the mountain landscape, this could be a metaphor for Ibsen's own career. The scene of Love's Comedy is an extended metaphor, a metaphysical landscape, from the city to the mountains. The action sustains an extended argument or dialectic in which characters confront each other for what they represent ideologically.  Love's Comedy is an autonomous, self-consistent poem, each detail 'there' to sustain the whole.  The ending of the play, when the idealistic lovers decide they must separate if they are to preserve true love, is the paradoxical conclusion to the whole action as dialectical argument..  At every point, things are in the play only because they are necessary to oraugment the argument.  It is as close as drama can get to a form of 'philosophy' - somewhat similar t a Platonic dialoogue.

The Pretenders is different. Ibsen makes Haakon, Skule and Nicholas bearers of thematic identity: Haakon, the will-to-unify Norway, Skule, the leader incapable of this will to unity, Nicholas, the schemer of disunity; nevertheless, a great many of the details are there in the play because they were there in the historical records.  Ibsen's friend, the Danish critic Georg Brandes, wrote about the problems with the historical novels of Walter Scott:

          The historical novel, with all its merits, is a bastard  species - now it is so
          hampered with historical material that the poetic development of the story
          is rendered impossible, - again it is so free in its  paraphrase of history that the real
          and the fictitious elements produce a very discordant whole.

The "poetic development of the story" means giving the story a "shape' or form that does not obey the rules of reality but of e.g. tragedy or comedy as genres. Within this non-realitic form the writer can create just those characters he needs, and no more, make them do only what his argument requires and give their actions a pace and rhythm controlled by the needs of the poetic idea. In 'Brand' it is a rhythm that carries his hero through his stages of the cross, through act by act loss and suffering up to his final sacrifice on the heights, beneath the ice church and its avalanche. It is a dramatic rhythm removed fromeveryday reality. And it is the dramatic rhythm of the Realist Cycle.

It is not surprising that 'Brand', like 'Love's Comedy' and 'Peer Gynt' is written in verse: whereas The Pretenders is written in realistic prose. In the verse plays Ibsen was not constrained by historical fact. This will be his method in the realist cycle where, though in the prose of modern speech rhythms, Ibsen creates an autonomous poetic world.

 Schiller got around the problem of combining poetic dialectics with historical fact by converting history into myth; creating opposing mythic forces out of Elizabeth and Mary, inventing a Mortimer to oppose Leicester, inventing Leicester's love for Mary to balance his false love for Elizabeth, shaping the five acts of his play to create a clear mythic, not historical pattern. In The Pretenders Ibsen sticks more closely than Schiller to the historical record and then 'heightens' it's details, as he also will do in 'Emperor and Galilean'. But, as Georg Brandes noted, this is disadvantageous for the development of the 'poetic idea' of a novel or play. If the poetic idea is emphasized, the history suffers: if the history is emphasized, the poetic idea suffers. Particularly unsatisfactory was Ibsen's attempt to bring in the supernatural dimension of Nicholas's ghostly resurrection in Act V, that violates the requirements of realistic mimesis.

. In 'Brand' and 'Peer Gynt' the supernatural elements are satisfying, having their place in the total poetic idea. In Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen uses a realist method his drama takes place in an extraordinary period when the supernatural was the way the world then was experienced. In the clash between Christianity and paganism, people lived life in direct relation with the metaphysical.   I suspect Ibsen believed that was a more adequate experience of the world than the materialism of capitalist nineteenth century Europe. In the plays that made Ibsen's reputation as a realist, this supernatural dimension is more plausibly, and powerfully, present .