• IBSEN COURSE •
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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
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Romanticism to Realism
an online course by Brian Johnston

WEEK VI: Notes to Emperor and Galilean, (Part One)
To The Third Empire, 224-271

[Text: Emperor and Galilean, Smith and Kraus1999]

1.       The Hegelian idea that each Individual is a ‘world soul’.  The self

          contains  immensities, including the history of the species.

2.       The deepening and widening of the Edmund Burke - Thomas Paine

           conflict.

3.       Is a Modern Tragedy possible?  ‘Cosmos and History’

4.       Making Tragedy out of History:  Aristotle’s dictum

5.       Ibsen 3 great ‘middle period’ plays - not written for the theatre.

6.       Julian the Apostate as the culmination of the Romantic Artist/Rebel.

7.       The accumulating Supertext of Modern Drama

8.       Emperor and Galilean is the foundation of the 12-play Cycle.  It’s

          themes, characters and actions recur throughout the Cycle.

9.       The Ideological Scene of the Play.

10      The nature of the Dramatic/Tragic Character in the New Drama.

11.     The Ideological Action of the Play

12.     Ibsen on the reason for not writing the play in verse.  (The play is more ‘realistic’ than
          the plays of the Realist Cycle).

13.     The play, Act by Act.

"The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Karl Marx
"The wounds that heal in time also contain the poison." Herbert Marcuse

Theme of Dialectical Drama: The Past in the Present

1. In each Individual the cultural and biological history of the Species is contained.
2. Each individual’s evolution interacts within evolving culture
3. To be free we must ‘know’ the cultural processes that made us what we are
4. We must identify the historical/cultural forces that harm and those could heal.
5.  Until then, we are self-alienated in an alienating world.

           The problem is to identity:

             (a)   What an authentic, free humanity should be

         (b) The forces preventing that truth and freedom.  

             (c)  How to ‘negate the negation and achieve a truer idea of human identity

       With Romanticism, history becomes of supreme importance so that, beginning with Friedrich Schiller, tragedy is located within evolutionary processes in history.  (Aeschylus’ The Oresteia  did this first!)  Both Schiller and Aeschylus ask the question, how did we become what we are?  This is the dramatic/philosophic agenda Ibsen continues.  Emperor and Galilean dramatizes a famous historical attempt to undo Christianity’s negation of our former humanity. Julian'sfailure at least ‘activates’ the multi-layered argument, or crisis, that the modern world must take up.  As always, Ibsen’s intention is not to indict or to proselytize but to ‘think adequately’ about the issue: to make us ‘see’ it in all its complexity..  For this reason, though his sympathies may be with Julian, he does not conceal the negative aspects of Julian’s character and actions.  Ibsen wishes to identify those forces and conflicts in the past that have made us what we are.  The burden of the past upon the present is deeply ambiguous: 

"The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." (Karl Marx)

"The wounds that heal in time also contain the poison” (Herbert Marcuse)

The past, which we must acknowledge contains the forces actively preventing our attaining 'self-determination" as individuals and as a civilization.  The Burk-Paine argument now has deepened immensely.  The Romantic and revolutionary spirit cannot, like Tom Paine, dismiss the past as merely “mouldy parchments' or the ‘preposterous "presumption of ruling from the grave."  The past is alive, living on in succeeding generations as Edmund Burke claimed   Present consciousness is the medium in which the past lives on, draining the lifeblood of the present as in Don Carlos, but also as a repository of neglected values whose recovery is necessary for human wholeness.

Is Modern Tragedy Possible?

      The demise of the Schillerian Idealist agenda set out in Don Carlos, left a cultural vacuum in which it seemed impossible to construct an ideological alternative to the triumphant materialism celebrated by Scribe and lamented by Büchner. Can the dramatist's subject, humanity, still contain 'universality' now culture has lost the unifying systems of both Greek and Christian thought?   Human society is now fragmented, divided into hostile opposing forces and beliefs, so that no dramatic hero can represent the fragmented culture.  The tragic hero/heroine is likely to be an isolated anomaly.as in modern ‘psychological’ dramas.  His or her suffering does not carry the whole community with it, but becomes something of a case study.  An answer had been to give historical-ideological forces both concrete particular individuality and universalizing identity by turning history into tragic myth and dialectic.(Schiller): that introduced a new dynamics while giving the defeated protagonists tragic status.  But it still kept the tragic action of a Don Carlos or Mary Stuart remote from our actual lives.

        Ibsen was to find the solution. If the identities of all of us have been determined and conditioned by forces from the past and if these forces erupt into our contemporary life, creating its disorders, psychopathologies and tragic errors, (and even its wars) then tragedy is the heritage of us all, however ‘lowly’, once we are ‘awakened’ to knowing our condition.  Universal consciousness and its past is something we all share.  Each one of us is a ‘world-soul’.  In Brand and Peer Gynt Ibsen ‘tested’ this idea in poetic and fantastic form.  In the 12-play Cycle he makes it the condition of everyday modern life.

             Early in his career Ibsen sought to locate tragedy in the past: that is, to fit the materials of history to the archetypal requirements of tragedy. But the two ‘systems’, history and tragedy, have different ‘agendas’ as Aristotle noted. . History could show what happened (a sequence of events without archetypal shaping) while Poetry could show what should have happened - the inner meaning unseen or misinterpreted by the actors and recorders of the events.    While history must be true to the ‘facts’ of the situation, poetry can investigate the reality behind the situation, re-arranging the ‘facts’ to bring out this ulterior truth.  The first extant Western drama, Aeschylus’ The Persians, already reveals the process of converting historical fact into archetypal truth. The mythic or archetypal ‘truth’ of an event is not contradicted by the different factual ‘truth’ of an event, for the mythic truth is the event seen from a different perspective and, arguably, seen more adequately.  Schiller performed this service for historical events: Ibsen, in the Realist Cycle, will do this for the contemporary world.

     Factual accounts of events are more vulnerable to contradiction than their mytho-poetic renderings.  Facts can always be refuted by new facts whereas mytho-poetic accounts are ‘above’ refutation. (To insist on the factual truth of e.g. Biblical texts subjects those texts to factual refutation while reducing their universality.  The Greeks, who had no Sacred Book, understood that myths were hypotheses, adaptable to changing cultural consciousness.  It is no accident this culture also inaugurated modern scientific thinking).  History, ideally, is pragmatic.  It does not impose form upon events, but shapes its narrative from the non-mythic interpretation of a succession of events.  Tragic reality, by contrast, is archetypal, returning historical events to a mythic and archetypal structure. Therefore tragedy and history are at odds.   Only Myth can free us from the meaningless continuum of time, of a mere succession of events without direction or discernible shape.   It is for this reason that T.S. Eliot, in his essay ’Ulysses,” Order and Myth’(1923)  praised James Joyce’s use in his Ulysses, of Homer’s Odyssey as a structure of parallels with which to shape “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.. History, however, must resist the tendency, essential to tragedy, to impose archetypal structuring onto reality. 

       When History begins to discover ‘patterns behind’ the facts – as it almost always does - it can be accused of being untrue to its proper methodology.  Absolutely accurate history ideally would eschew of all interpretation even of seeing some facts as more important than others. It would create an endless archive of uninterpreted detail, like Borges’ Babylonian Library or some vast recording instrument situated above the planet.  .  Once history interprets events it approximates to the same business as poetry and philosophy.  Tragedy obeys a 'mythic logic of 'necessity', ‘fate', which is not the logic of history.  Tragic, drama has to be false to history’s facticity.  Necessity, Aristotle noted, should inform tragic plots. Necessity comes from seeing in events the operation of ineluctable powers that take on the aspect of mythic forces. Apollo, for example, as hidden director, controls all the events of ˆThe Libation Bearers.  

In the plays of Sophokles the human action, though ostensibly and even heroically independent, is directed and controlled by a god, bringing about the required result.  In Ibsen’s Realist Cycle the divine function is performed by the dialectic: a tragic logic working beneath the surface on the hidden contradictions and conflicts within reality.  Historical facts, by contrast, are not 'fated' and do not, properly, reveal mythic or archetypal patterns. They are arbitrary, uncontrollable, without the ‘closure’ we require from tragic art.  Schiller's solution, of confidently seeing ideological forces shaping historical events so that his 'victims' are also sacrifices to the progress of universal ideas could not survive a later skepticism that would question reading such ideas into history. 

The requirements for a historical tragedy are:

        (i) The historical hero, to be tragic, must fail.

        (ii)The failure must be consequential, meaningful.

        (iii)If he/she  succeeds but others tragically suffer, (Shakespeare's Henry V)the result is not tragic

Schiller's Don Carlos is tragic: the 'positive' forces,Elizabeth, Carlos, Posa are defeated by the forces of darkness.

Julian is tragic: he and his honorable cause are defeated, sacrificed to the historical forces that opposed him.

1. Emperor and Galilean

          In the three 'middle-period' plays, Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean Ibsen abandoned the limitations of the stage to explore the full dimensions of his imaginative world in terms of time (our place in total history) and space (our place in Nature and the Cosmos).  There was no theater of the time in which this exploration could take place. After these three plays, Ibsen created that new theater, with his 12-play Realist Cycle, at the same time bringing the large historical and natural forces that have created us, into his modern drawing rooms. This is the same modernist project as those of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Emperor and Galilean is the culmination of two aspects of German drama from Lessing, through Schiller and Kleist to Buechner and the Ibsen of Brand  and Peer Gynt:

     It's tendency, ever since Nathan the Wise,  to be philosophical,

     It's tendency to create ideological conflict through historical conflict. 

      Hegel, commended Schiller and Goethe's historical plays for choosing as their subject dramatic characters and actions at an historical turning point whose outcome would have major effect upon the world.   He observed that in modern times only the rebel can be wholly 'universal'.   In modern society each person is a fragment and cannot represent the whole, as a Sophoklean or Elizabethan hero like Oedipus and Hamlet could,.  The modern rebel -of any social standing - can be universal because rebellion opposes the whole social structure - as universal a role as the earlier prince representing the whole social structure.    The archetypal rebel is Jesus Christ opposing in spirit an entire established empire and initiating a new world order.   The shapers of the modern world similarly are men and women who initiate new ways of conceiving the world..  The ‘playwright as thinker’ has this in common with such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche who created much of the supertext  of our modern world. 

 Julian as World-Historical Artist/Rebel

         Of all historical rebellions Julian's perhaps was the most consequential.  Becoming the most powerful emperor on earth, he then sought to reverse the process of history and overthrow Christianity and its empire.  Julian did not set out only to conquer a material empire like Tamburlaine, but the empire of the human spirit - to permanently change the nature of humanity. This had been the goal of the ideologues of the French Revolution.  In Germany this political ambition was transposed into the realm of thought and art.   This ‘redemptive’ function of art proclaimed by Friedrich Schiller in ‘The Aesthetic Education of Mankind’ and fervently advanced by Richard Wagner, was a core principle of Romanticism. Ibsen believed this to constitute his vocation as an artist. One version of this was the belief that between the artist and the people ('folk') an imaginative link could establish a mutual reclamation of the buried riches of the cultural past. This "native, nameless poem of the folk" in Richard Wagner's words, lay waiting to be awakened beneath the surface of modern, alienated reality. (cf. The Dangerous Seductions of the Past Week I.) ).This belief was to be disappointed as ‘the people’ or ‘folk’ showed themselves notably unresponsive to the artist’s experiments in revivifying the cadavers of past epochs.  Emperor and Galilean contains this aesthetic heartbreak at its centre.   The situation of Julian, attempting to revive in his empire the once vital and beautiful culture of Greek paganism” is close to Ibsen’s own situation as a poet, endeavoring to establish a more adequate, past-filled archetypal imagination in his theater and its audience.  Both Julian and Ibsen seek to revive the past through forms of theater.

      In Part Two of Emperor and Galilean Julian, as emperor,‘stages’ pagan processions and rituals that attempt to completely transform the spirit of his empire: to resurrect its pagan past.  However, he discovers the public is cruelly indifferent to his endeavors, that resemble theatricals, to back life to the corpse: (p. 108)

[The Dionysus procession proceeds down the street  Flute players are in the lead;
Drunken men, some of them dressed as fauns and satyrs, dance to the rhythm. 
At the center of the procession is EMPEROR JULIAN, riding on a donkey which is covered
with a panther skin; he is dressed like the god Dionysos, with a panther skin over his
shoulders, a crown of vine leaves on his brow, and in his hand a staff wound round with green leaves and tipped with a pine cone,like a thyrsus.  Half-naked painted women and youths, dancers and acrobats, surround him; some are carrying wine jars and drinking bowls, others beat on tambourines, gesturing and leaping wildly forward. [p.108]

  As the procession sings a hymn to Dionysos the crowd in Constantinople look on with bewilderment and contempt:

  A VOICE IN THE CROWD:  The Emperor’s in the company of tumblers and whores [108]

        Emperor and Galilean dramatizes Julian’s bid to undo the Christian revolution and to resurrect a vital, multicultural paganism after its spirit irrevocably has been suppressed.  All he has as his means is the persuasiveness of his philosophical pamphlets and the ineffectual appeal of his theatrical ritual performances.  His dilemma resembles that of a dramatic artist with an inadequate company, a controversial repertory and an indifferent or hostile public: a situation not unlike that of Ibsen  himself..  If drama was to challenge the inauthenticity of modern life it had to come up with a authentically plausible – that is, actually livable mimesis. It needed to establish that more liberating dimensions of life could be located within a recognizable, everyday reality,

              Characters and themes of Emperor and Galilean will recur throughout the 12-play Realist Cycle. [Hedda Gabler is a replay in miniature].  The dramatic psychology Ibsen created in Julian is of a character who could inhabit a world realistically yet also be a ‘field’ in which world-forces emerge and engage in conflict.  This, later, will constitute the dramatic psychology throughout of the Realist Cycle.  In Julian, Ibsen constructed a plausible portrait of a 'mind' directly engaged with ideological conflict affecting his conscious and unconscious being, from his emotional and sexual conflicts and continuing through interpersonal, social, cultural, historical, natural and supernatural dimensions.   Julian is the sounding board of his extraordinary culture.

 The Story of Julian.

    The play keeps close to the recorded historical facts.  Emperor Constantine, to consolidate imperial power decreed Christianity should be the official religion of the empire: (monarchy and monotheism making an effective totalitarian combination.) In the century or so that followed Christianity tightened its grip on imperial power and on all social life. It began its cultural persecution and extermination of the Greek pagan world and its cults, destroying the temples, later closing the universities, ending the Olympic Games and the theater.    At the time of the play, pagan learning still survived as a means of teaching eloquence to Christians in the hope that the Christians could use pagan eloquenceagainst the pagans; for until then, the Christians were getting the worst of the arguments. 

          Julian, brought up a devout Christian, was steeped in pagan learning in order to be a champion of Christ.  His entire family, with the exception of himself and his brother Gallus, was wiped out by the Christian emperor, Constantius.  Eleven relatives perisherd. Gallus is the twelfth, so that Julian is the 'thirteenth' of his family.   (In the séance scene in Ephesus, it is not certain whether Julian, 'the thirteenth wheel', will be a new Christ or Judas).  Both Julian and Gallus live in daily expectation of being murdered.   We learn that the condition of totalitarian control over Julian is absolute.  Every move he makes is dictated by the emperor and watched by the emperor's spies.  His wife, his career, even his food, are chosen for him..

The Ideological Scene of the Play

          The scene is the Western World itself at a crucial turning point.  The conclusion of the play's action will crucially shape all subsequent cultural history, creating that modern identity which will be inherited and 'psycho-analyzed’ by the Realist Cycle.  Its argument will constitute much of the Cycle's 'Supertext’ throughout.  The spiritual division the play enacts is not simply a case of pagans versus Christians: the Christians are still possessed by pagan passions they attempt to deny, rendering pagan joy of life shameful and ugly.  (The theme of Ghosts)  Julian, the apostate trying to resurrect th spirit of paganism,  is temperamentally more like a devout Christian.  He will marry Helena, a pagan sensualist’ in temperament, but brought up to be a fanatic Christian.  The marriage of Julian and Helena is one of the great ironies of the play.

          The sequence of scenes in Part One advances the plot and the dialectic.   Ibsen follows the actual events of Julian’s history by placing him in Constantinople (the Christian power-center) then in Athens (the still surviving center of Greek pagan culture). The Ephesus séance with Maximus suggests a ‘synthesis’ in which Faith (Constantinople) and Reason (Athens) might combine into a new cultural power.  Maximus, the pagan mystic and prophet, is historical. He did have agreat following, and Julian did take part, with Maximus, in 'theurgic’ (occult) ceremonies in order to make contact with the spirit world.  Ibsen's opponents, Gregory and Basil also are historical characters.

          Acts IV and V are are similarly historic, realistic and metaphoric which accounts for their dramatic power.   The dramatization of the historical facts required their imaginative recreation as drama.  Ibsen does not drastically rewrite history but re-envisages’ the historical facts so that their metaphoric ‘truth’ is revealed.  The Scene of each Act encloses and determines the nature of its ideological action. The first three acts practically constitute a dialectical syllogism

The next two acts impel Julian from the world of the spirit to that of political action

Act 4  Military camp = Julian in the snare of  world events:  as Caesar, as successful general, as rebel against the emperorand the Christian empire..  The fateful decision to accept the imperial role closes off the spiritual path.

Act 5 Vienne = A vertical symbolic scene.  A stairway leads above, to the open world, to the empire Julian will take over, to the high dome of the Church where the priests are performing a fraudulent 'miracle' with the body of the corrupt Helena, now a ‘saint’.  Above, in the world of Light is ‘the Lie’.  Meanwhile, outside, the army is in near-revolt, waiting for Julian to emerge decisively and act in the world.  He is being vertically 'pulled' by the external world above and by the internal world of the vaults below, in the vaults and the darkness, Maximus searches for the right decision for Julianto take.

Julian's Tragic Character

          The adequate tragic hero of a modern ‘world-historical drama’ must be able to act from a genuine attempt to understand the requirements of the "world" – to be an impressive thinker as well as doer.  The first three acts of Emperor and Galillean initially were titled “Julian Among the Philosophers" revealing the intellectual aspect of the hero engaging in debate, searching for solutions.  Julian, here, is the hero as thinker.  Act s IV and V. depict Julian caught up in the military and political intrigues of the world, as successful general and rebel -  like Lenin later, moving fromtheory’ to ‘practice’ by going to the Finland Station to take part in the Russian revolution.

          The tragedy of the hero as thinker also will be that of his cause and all it stands for.   He or she will be representative in sharing the confusions of the age so that failure will be as much due to the conditions of the culture as to the individual’s personality.  In the protagonist’s choices and actions, in his or her confusions and sufferings, we are meant to see a world-condition embodied.  Ibsen insisted Julian's tragic story was relevant to events in the modern world.  The defeat of Hellenism and the rousing of a corrupted Christianity to new purpose and power at a time when the Western World was in spiritual and intellectual chaos and confusion could be seen as analagous to Ibsen’s nineteenth century Europe where Christianity was battling a new scientism and materialism. In 1872, when Ibsen was completing Emperor and Galilean, Friedrich Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy which has remarkable affinities with the themes of Ibsen's play.  The play also shares many themes and concerns with nineteenth-century, post-Darwinian thinkers: the sense of coming at the twilight of European culture. of searching for some new direction for the human spirit..

Through his campaign against the Christians, Julian paradoxically rallied them just as they were declining in spiritual power.  Thereby he made Christianity a more formidable force.  By what Hegel would call "the cunning of Reason" Julian’s attempt to reverse history and overthrow Christianity in fact achieved the opposite: re-uniting and rejuvenating a Christianity in spiritual decline.

Ibsen's Break with Verse Drama

            After Peer Gynt, Ibsen gave up verse drama just when he had shown such mastery in it.  His next two plays, The League of Youth and Emperor and Galilean, both were realistic and both in prose.  Like Brand and Peer Gynt these two plays are dialectical antitypes.  Ibsen seems to proceed by contraries in this dialectical manner.   The League of Youth is modern, local, small-town and parochial. The phrase,‘the local conditions’["de lokale forholde"] is repeated throughout the text like a persistent musical motif.   It is a political comedy written for the theatre (it is still successful in performance in Norway). {cf. To The Third Empire pp. 208-223]  Emperor and Galilean is a huge ‘world-historical drama’ searching into the past, present and future of the entire western world.  It too, has a persistent l motif:‘the third empire’["det tredje rike"]   sounded throughout the play.‘. 

All of human history seems to be turning upon the agonized decisions and the fate of emperor Julian.   It is the Schillerian historical drama taken to its furthest limit, with Julian as a Marquis of Posa on the world-imperial throne.   The play follows closely the historical facts of Julian the Apostate,  re-imagining them as brilliant reader’s theater.  It is theatrically conceived, however, (it would make a superb historical movie!)In a lettter to the English poet and scholar, Edmund Gosse, who wondered why Ibsen did not write Emperor and Galilean in verse, Ibsen explained his choice of realistic prose:

          ...the play is conceived in the most realistic style.  The
          illusion I wished to produce was that of reality.  I wished
          to produce the impression on the reader that he was reading
          something that had actually happened.  If I had employed verse
          I would have counteracted my own intention and defeated my
          purpose.  The many ordinary, insignificant characters whom I
          have intentionally introduced into the play would have become
          indistinct and indistinguishable from one another if I had allowed
          them to speak in the same meter.  We are no longer living in
          the days of Shakespeare.

          There are a number of things to note about that passage.  First, the play is addressed to a reader, so that we are in a 'mental theater' that is not subjected to the constraints of stage space and time.  The reader is to imagine that what he or she is reading is actually happening in a real world.  It is not part of an intense, concentrated theatrical ritual like Ghosts, where an audience is ‘worked upon’ by the timing of the performance.. The rhythms of Emperor and Galilean are more relaxed, more casual and wayward, less 'directed' and less aesthetically driven than Ibsen's work in the theatre. Like the novelist he has time to create, and dwell upon, passing moments and, as she wrote,  many insignificant characters and incidents.       

      Emperor and Galilean, like Brand and Peer Gynt, is intended to be read, not performed.  The reader is the performer, recreating the scenes in his or her own mind's eye, thus individually reliving it as in reading a novel.   However, the dramatic Act-Scene ratio is far more disciplined than the more flexible procedure of the novel form.  For example, Gore Vidal's novel, Julian can cut to other sequences and scenes and times, supply authorial commentary, drop an action when convenient, and so on.  Ibsen, when he sets up an Act, has to stick with it, keep his and our eye upon it, and make it convincing and compelling, creating and sustaining its rhythm from opening to close.  To concentrate our minds he must carry a whole act through, without jumping or cutting across scenes, in order to sustain the central experience of Julian.’s evolving consciousness, his process of learning in the enacted moment.   Nor can Ibsen hide behind a director and actor, as in the theater, nor practice novelistic evasions: musings, unspoken thoughts, jumps in narrative. Consider the following hypothetical transformation of a scene from Emperor and Galilean into the novelistic method: (Cf. pp. 21-22)

 No sooner had Gallus finished speaking than the great chapel doors swung open and the imperial procession emerged in a choreographed display of stately ceremony, the gilding on the Easter banners reflecting light from the torches' flares. Julian made up his mind to confront Hekebolius before embarking on his more dangerous petition to the emperor whose mental condition at this moment seemed alarmingly unstable. In one of these abrupt swings of mood Constantinus was capable of any atrocity.  Hekebolius, therefore, would be the safer bet. Uppermost in Julian’s thoughts was what he’d just learned from Libanios; that Hekebolius was the author of  those wounding satires comparing him to a monkey in court dress. ‘A monkey, eh?’ he said to himself grimly, ‘Well, a monkey can be cunning too."”  His long suppressed impatience with his tutor now broke through to the surface.  His mind flashed back to the day when Hekebolius brought him the satiric verses, unctuously watching his pupil as he read the humiliating lines......”  And so on.).

            Ibsen, on the other hand, must get us to fathom Julian’s inward drama through purely outward references, recording, not interpreting, the events. He leaves the interpretation up to us. It is a difficult performance to bring off.  We must conjure the scene and its characters into life in our mental theater without authorial commentary or theatrical aid,.  This reader's theater, of bringing a plausible world into existence through purely objective dramatic means only, is as difficult to create as the theatrical script which has as its aim an ideal performance..  It was an excellent rehearsal for the new realism Ibsen was going to develop. And so the dialogue, as Ibsen explained to Gosse,  "cannot be in verse" but has to be in a prose that is more realistic either than verse or the more 'theatrically directed' prose of the realist Cycle.  In a play like Ghosts, the compressed time and space of the performance keeps the audience’s focus held within the aesthetic-dramatic structure in a way quite  unlike the relaxed ‘real life’ texture and rhythm of Emperor and Galilean.

THE PLAY ACT BY ACT

ACT ONE: Julian Abandons the Christian Scene

     The play opens on a great crowd scene before a church, the Chapel of the Imperial Palace in Constantinople        

(The Cross’s honor and glory shall be for ever.  The Serpent is consigned to the depths of the abyss.   The Lamb has conquered.  On earth is peace.)

          As the choir proclaims the earth is at peace with the victory of Christ; the first action that follows is a brawl, first with Christians setting upon pagans, and then the different sects of Christians setting upon each other.  The causes of the mob’s squabbles are the same highly arcane and esoteric doctrinal disputes that also are driving the theologians of the Church and Court into vicious verbal warfare.  The drama opens, therefore, with a broadly comic introduction of its themes.  This prepares for the graver conflicts that will follow andl tear the empire apart. It is obvious the Christian world is radically disunited, filled with contradictions, confusions and unsettled conflicts.   This comedic street squabbling will evolve into conflicts between armies led by opposing princes; much as a brief opening motif in a symphony (e.g. Beethoven’s Fifth) will be elaborated into a whole dynamic pattern..

         We get an illustration of these expanding contradictions in the magnificent imperial procession that now interrupts the brawling crowd.  A guard cries out "The Emperor!"  The hymn to the Galilean is repeated and the Court emerges "in stately procession' with priests, soldiers, courtiers and the imperial bodyguard” - all splendidly costumed.  However, the characters inhabiting the costumes contradict the splendid display.  The Emperor, a young man, is "dark and distrustful - and mentally tormented; his walk and demeanor betray unease and debility."  The Empress "is pale and delicately built “.  Prince Julian’s eyes betray unease for they glance about restlessly and he is awkward in his court dress.  The emperor seems to be ruled by his slave, Memnon.

          There is something wrong with this seemingly magnificent procession. We will learn that the emperor, to gain and maintain power, is the murderer of eleven members of Julian's family, among many other victims.  In the dialogue that follows, Julian obviously is fearful for his life, while the homicidal emperor is terrified of God because of his crimes.  The whole stately procession has disintegrated into confused fears and passions.  Gallus, it seems, is in great danger.  But when the procession re-emerges some time later, the emperor has made peace with his God and is ready to act ruthlessly once again. He appoints Gallus Caesar to "appease eleven ghosts" but this will also be the beginning of Gallus' destruction.   The ideas of 'emperor' and 'galilean' and the contradiction between them are acted out brilliantly in front of our eyes.

          What these two processions - into and then out from the chapel - show, is the interconnection between individual psychology, and faith, power, ideology - in short world-historical events and people, where the people influence the events and the events mold and create the people.  It is the subtlest historical drama so far, free of the rhetorical histrionics of Don Carlos or the histrionic cynicism of Büchner’s Danton’s Death.

          Act One depicts the multilayered ‘sickness’ of Constantinople.  It is a sickness that comes from the mutually destructive intertwining of worldly with spiritual power encapsulated in the "render unto Caesar" motif of the play.  The Christians, now in power, are privileged, oppressive, wealthy and decadent.   The court operates a totalitarian system of spies and thought police, stifling intellectual and spiritual freedom  Into this degenerate world appears Agathon, Julian's childhood friend, now a fanatic Christian, somewhat like the 'converted' Ejnar in Brand.   Agathon relates going on a mob rampage with fellow Christians, beating, robbing and killing pagans, destroying their temples and houses and then succumbing to a fever in which, lying in bed, he had a vision of a figure urging him to seek out the one who would defeat the Church's enemies.

          But the most impressive image in Act One is that of a procession of pagans, a philosopher, Libanios, and his Greek students, with vine leaves in their hair, laughing and arguing without rancor - in direct contrast to the squabbling Christian fanatics and the tormented imperial processon.  Their sudden appearance interrupts the reminiscences of Agathon and Julian, intruding a pagan image into the Christian scene. They are on their way to Athens, still a city of schools of learning not yet closed down by the Christian authorities.  Here, therefore, the two traditions, Greek-pagan and Christian, are set against each other: faith vs. learning, dogmatism vs. "joy-of-life."

          Libanios, however, is not completely honest, as he pretends not to recognize Julian: nevertheless, the effect he has on the young prince is profound.  As the pagans disappear into the night, bound "for Athens" they are a powerful reminder, in schismatic Constantinople, of the former Hellenic beauty.  To counter this influence, Agathon now tells Julian of his vision.

The Supernatural dimensions of the play

          This brings up the whole question of the 'visionary' and supernatural elements of this play.  At the time of Julian, people did see visions, have prophetic dreams, hear voices, and so on.  They believed they were in contact with occult influences and developed faculties for divination that the modern world has lost the power of - or skill for.   The historical sources Ibsen drew upon by reputable historians record this visionary aspect of the age.  Maximus, the theurgic seer, is a historical character and was credited with performing the 'spiritualist' phenomena recorded in the play.  All this paranormal activity may have been the condition of the cultural psyche at that extraordinary period in which major spiritual traditions clashed and fought for supremacy.  In the twelve-play Realist Cycle that follows Êmperor and Galilean there often is an occult quality to the actions in which, like the unseen presence of the gods in Greek drama, the dialectic of each play is bringing about events.

          After the re-emergence of the procession from the Chapel, when Gallus is made Caesar and Julian learns of the duplicities of his Christian tutor, Hekebolius, Julian begs to be allowed to go into the desert to prepare to challenge the pagan thinkers.  Instead, however, he is planning to follow Libanios to Athens.

ACT TWO: Julian Abandons the Helenic World

          Act One explored the spiritual condition of the reigning power of Church and the Court, mired in sterile theological disputation and serving a corrupt and repressive power structure.  Act Two will explore the dismaying hollowness of intellectual Hellenism where Athenian learning has degenerated from a genuinely liberating spiritual force into academic pedantry and casuistry.  Neither the old beauty (Greece) nor the new Truth (Christianity) will be the answer Julian is looking for.  Though he has an easy time embarrassing Gregory and the Christians with the "render unto Caesar" evasion of Jesus, this unsolved problem remains at the heart of the play. The Act opens with the two Christians, Basil and Gregory, (historically, opponents of Julian and important leaders of the Church) commenting in prim distaste on the antics of the Athenians.  But soon we hear of real crimes committed by the Christians who, because they deny and repress their passions, express them in degenerate and perverse form.  Act Two, with its pagan scene of colonnades and statues and young students, dramatizes Julian's disillusion with Athens, with all book learning, and his search for a more compelling form of knowledge.  That will take him to Ephesus.

ACT THREE:  Ephesus - The Third Empire

     Maximus, a famous historical figure, was reported to commune with spirits and enjoyed a great following among many at the time..  It was a time, like the nineteenth century too, of the emergence of a host of occult and spiritualist cults, of gurus and prophets of a new dawn and of a widespread search for a new direction for the spirit.   The historical Julian, like most at the time, did believe in spirits and miracles.    In Act III we see him summoning something like the "world-soul" to discover his place in history: how he might become a shaper of the world-spirit.  Ibsen 'stages' a séance and as this is a play for reading he makes it vivid for the reader.  Maximus is disturbed by the implication of the séance, that Julian will be a negative force in the world; one of the 'nay-sayers' who do the world's will by opposing it, like Cain and like Judas. Julian, apparently, follows these two as the crucial "third spirit" in the room.  The séance can be explained psychologically, as a semi-hypnotic state of receptivity; this would make Maximus a charlatan.  But the historical records claim that Maximus, a courageous martyr for his beliefs, did perform such ceremonies and magical feats.  In an age that continually wrought itself up to experience spiritually visionary phenomena, such events probably were frequent. 

          The answer Julian seeks in the séance goes to the heart of historical drama:  how can one be the chosen instrument of the world-will and at the same time freely will from one’s own volition.    How does one will the right thing, make the right historical choice and be the person of destiny, especially when events are rapidly changing around one..  Famous world leaders, Napoleon, Lenin or Mao - or Hitler-  often have a highly superstitious sense of being 'fated' to do what they do.  Napoleon saw himself as a "man of destiny". Julian, however, wants to attain spiritual, not temporal power,  .   but just at that moment in the séance, soldiers from the emperor arrive (the co-incidence could suggest the world-will at work)    The soldiers break in, not to murder Julian, as he thinks, but to make him Caesar in place of his murdered brother, Gallus -  now the twelfth in the family of victims  Julian it seems, is the 'thirteenth at table' :Christ or Judas.?    I thinkthese thirteen victims are to make a symmetrical parallel to the Christian 13 and to Judas who appeared in the séance.  This seems to be what the séance predicted, but Maximus is disturbed.  By accepting the title of Caesar, Julian is choosing the way of political-military power, not of spiritual knowledge.  Compared with Gallus who was something of a young brute, the pagan Julian will prove to have much finer survival skills.

ACT FOUR:  Treachery of Helena - the Cleverness of Julian

          Julian now is a successful general, and as such, is a threat to the emperor, as his victories contrast with Constantius's defeats.  He knows, therefore, that the emperor is now 'after' him.  The psychological study of Helena, the voluptuous Christian whose affairs include Gallus and a Christian priest, is striking.  There is a fine irony in her frustrating marriage to Julian, the chaste pagan who dreams of Hellenic freedom but lives like a monk.  

              There is a finely paced sequence as Decentius arrives from the emperor.  Decentius is clever,    
 and it is his mission both to murder Helena and to take Julian prisoner to be slaughtered like Gallus. .  But Julian totally outwits Decentius, getting the army on his side and against the emperor, while all the time keeping up the language of loyalty to the emperor.  The dying Helena enter, with her revelations of infidelities with both Gallus and, more recently, a Christian priest.  After adroitly disposing of her, Julian now sets about taking care of Decentius and the army.   Ibsen is able to depict, convincingly, the game of power politics. 

ACT FIVE: Conquering the Empire Against "The Lie".

     In the Church, through the priests and their 'miracles' performed by Helena's corpse, the great deception is taking place.  Julian goes down into the depths of the catacombs for the 'light'.  That is, the truth lies in the depths, not in the high dome of the church where a planted “angelic” voice in the church vault is proclaiming Helena's 'miracles'. In disgust, Julian makes his bid for power and to challenge the emperor.  By doing so, he has decided his own destiny, which will not be that of the thinker and discoverer of a new faith, but that of the political-military commander of an empire.  Whether he had any free choice in this is part of the riddle of the play: but it sets him up for his campaign against the Christian world.         

         For the purpose of this course, it is enough to study PART ONE of Emperor and Galilean.    The student is encouraged to continue with PART TWO that shows Julian as a persecutor of the Christians in retaliation for their attacks on him.  The historical Julian, in fact, was a tolerant ruler, an efficient administrator, and a fine and brave general well-liked by his troops.  He did promote pagan soldiers over Christians and he did take away some of the blatant privileges of the Christians but these were mainly to correct the abuses of the old order.  Ibsen, however, shows Julian declining into petty tyranny and pedantry, unfortunately dragged down by his fanatic opponents into fierce polemic. Petty tyranny and dogmatic pedantry, unfortunately, are not histrionically compelling qualities, so that Part Two frequently fails to attain the dramatic intensity of Part One.  Much of Part Two is taken up with tortuous altercations, doctrinal disquisitions and miraculous events.  The play generally stays sympathetic to Julian but despite frequently brilliant and powerful scenes throughout, only in the final scenes does it recover the full strength of Part One  For those with the time, however, reading the whole work is amply rewarding.    

          Where will Ibsen go now?  Emperor and Galilean has taken historical tragedy as far as it can go.  It has shown a dramatic hero, in supreme command of an empire, consciously and actively attempting to alter the entire course of human destiny and identity by trying to resurrect the spiritual values of the past against an alienated and oppressive present.  Most Ibsen commentators have claimed that Ibsen now retreated and, in the Realist Cycle, performed some kind of cultural lobotomy on his art, deciding to write about real people in real trouble. They read the plays as addressing, first "the problems of the present", then analyzing aberrant individuals, and finally offering the public riddles of his private life..  In this account, his career would represent  an ever-contracting spiral.  I claim on the contrary that Ibsen now embarked upon his major and most imaginative work: a Cycle of twelve modern plays resurrecting into the present scene archetypal actions and characters from the cultural history of the West.  The modern realist plays are haunted and agitated by the spiritual past of the race.