¹ Frank Wedekind, Schauspielkunst/Ein Glossarium (Munich and Leipzig: Georg Mueller, 1910) “Ibsen,” p. 10. After this initial tribute, Wedekind's comments on Ibsen are largely negative, beginning with the charge that he had provided “keine neue Dramatik”—an accusation to be expected from one championing expressionistic innovation against the then reigning naturalistic style.

² “On Point of View in the Arts,” in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), p. 100.

³ The Seven Ages of Theater (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 21.

⁴ Ruysbroeck, quoted in Ralph Baldwin, The Unity of the Canterbury Tales (Copenhagen: Roskilde and Bagger, 1955), pp. 38-39.

⁵ Anderson, Ruth L., Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Russell & Russell, [1927] reissued 1966), p. 9.Google Scholar

⁶ The problem of “Naturalism” vs. “formalism” in acting through the entire period under discussion is a vexed and much debated one; my intention is to invoke it only sufficiently to delineate the strong contrast such acting generally offers to that of the period initiated by Peer Gynt. John Gassner sums up the formalist position maintained by Harbage, Bethell, and others as follows: “The prerealistic conventions of acting were based on the principle—a thoroughly theatrical one—that the actor's first prerogative is to exhibit himself and display his skill. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the audience felt it imperative for him to lose himself in the role. Like his predecessors, the old mimes and virtuosi of the commedia dell'arte, he stood out as a performer rather than a character.” (Directions in Modern Theater and Drama. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, p. 25). This position is vigorously disputed by B. L. Joseph (Elizabethan Acting. London: Oxford University Press, 1964), who finds in the handbooks of oratory and rhetoric of the time, many pre-StanisIavskian injunctions that acting be “lively” and “natural.” Much of this argument depends on the words “nature” and “natural” having the same meaning then as today, an assumption questioned by Robert R. Findlay: “ …usually pre-twentieth century ‘nature,’ or more precisely ‘natural’ acting, meant simply that a performer gave to each emotional state, which he had abstracted from human nature and divested of individual differences, the appropriate gestures and voice. In short, the ‘natural’ actor of the past projected not particularized reality, as we think of it today, but rather general nature, universals.” (“Charles Macklin and the Problem of ‘Natural’ Acting,” ETJ, March 1967, p. 33). Similarly, the early nickelodeon films, presenting scenes of spastic frenzy, were hailed in their time for an amazing fidelity to life.

⁷ Muir, Kenneth, ed. Shakespeare: The Comedies (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 2-3.Google Scholar

⁸ A transition which finds its analogy as well in philosophy: “From Kant to about 1900 we observe a determinate tendency in theoretical thought to eliminate substances and to replace them by functions.” Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on the Novel,” op. cit., p. 62.

⁹ Koht, Life of Ibsen (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1931), Vol. II, p. 34.

¹⁰ Hegelian philosophy was all-pervasive in the intellectual centers of the Northern countries during the mid-nineteenth century (for a prophetic sample of theorizing a la mode, see p. 44 of this issue). Ibsen—described by Koht as one who was “always interested in philosophy, and liked to discuss every type of philosophical question”—apparently derived his receptivity to the System from, appropriately, a triad of lesser H's: Heiberg, Hettner, and Hebbel. Brian Downs, Ibsen: The Intellectual Background (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1948), is useful in placing these tributary figures as well as indicating (pp. 79-80) some of the sources from which Ibsen's Kierkegaardian ideas stemmed. In marking this confrontation of Hegel and Kierkegaard as a watershed moment in the development of European thought, Karl Jaspers goes even further than Ortega, e.g., “the great history of Western philosophy from Parmenides and Heraclitus through Hegel can be seen as a thorough-going and completed unity.” Reason and Existenz (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), pp. 22-23.

¹¹ Briefly, the two ways of self-realization derive from the metaphysical assumptions of each thinker. For Hegel, all reality—the self, the cosmos, nature, history—exhibits one dynamic evolving structure at work, that structure being entirely rational, since by Hegel's idealist premise essential reality is of the nature of, and therefore wholly intelligible to, the logical mind. Since this rational structure is, finally, all that is, Hegel terms it Absolute Reason. Absolute Reason works by means of the famed dialectic: a thesis which generates its opposing antithesis, to be resolved in a higher synthesis.

Since the self is integrally part of the rational totality of the real, it too must develop by means of the dialectic. Its thesis is ordinary consciousness: accepting the world of the senses spontaneously and without question. The antithetical stage that follows is self-consciousness: the mind grown aware of consciousness itself, questioning things, turning reflectively inward. The crowning synthesis is reason: the condition of enlightened awareness of Absolute Reason, both inwardly and outwardly, as the ground of all that is. Thus in Hegel's philosophy, one comes to full self-realization contemplatively, by progressive expansions of consciousness.

However, for Kierkegaard, the existentialist, it is impossible for the finite human mind to grasp the whole of reality as intelligible, as a rational system—even presuming that it is such. By making this assertion, Hegel is guilty of reducing the rich panoply of actual existence to a system of ideas or logical essences, and then proclaiming these essences as sole reality. But in point of fact, Kierkegaard observes, existence precedes and includes essence, which is only a barren field of concepts, a Begriffenfeld. The problem of how to realize the self—the theme of Peer Gynt—thus involves not the recognition of an essence, a soul given once and forever, but instead a contingent relationship of choosing oneself continually, day by day, experience to experience, through an existential act of self-determining will. Since the authentically existing individual is the exclusive category within which this on-going self-definition takes place, it follows for Kierkegaard that truth is subjectivity alone, encountered through an attitude of inwardness, of “being (or becoming) oneself.”

Although Peer Gynt represents a clear-cut repudiation of Hegelian thought, by the time of the completion of Emperor and Galilean (1873), Ibsen had reconciled himself with certain structural and historical principles that the System could provide. Elsewhere in this issue, Brian Johnston has proposed that Hegel eventually reassumed a position of commanding importance in Ibsen's work, as the buried foundation of his final cycle of naturalistic dramas.

¹² By then proposing to melt down Peer's onion self, the Buttonmolder does no more than confirm that the identity he arraigns has been, throughout the play, in a suspended state of dissolution: “Yourself is just what you've never been-/ So what difference to you to get melted down?” Peer Gynt, V, vii. Similarly with Kierkegaard in philosophy, as George Price has pointed out: “it can be argued with some justice that…Kierkegaard had dissolved [the self] into a bundle of relationships, and reached the conclusion that it was all pure possibility. But his reply to this would be equally just: “I do not dissolve man; he is already dissolved. What else is man but a possibility that seldom becomes an actuality?” The Narrow Pass: A Study of Kierkegaard's Concept of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 66. The last sentence could easily stand as an epigraph to Ibsen's entire twelve-play naturalistic cycle.

¹³ Strindbergs Dramatik (Stockholm: Radiotjänst, 1949), pp. 378-81, 405. In both instances, Strindberg's prototypal form, the vandringsdrama, derives in his own canon from Lucky Peer's Journey (1882), first of a scries of modulations of the Peer Gynt theme.

¹⁴ Certain new forms of post-absurdist theatre have a more complicated, tenuous—some would say, non-existent—relationship to the developmental model of the spine of the dramatic tradition from the Renaissance on. Thus Richard Schechner has written of absurdist theatre as set against tradition, whereas the new theatre of happenings is set apart from it, as a “second tradition” in process of formation. At least one writer on non-matrixed theatre, however, indicates that it may in fact derive from a still more radical interiorization within the third phase. In an aptly titled “State of the Onion Message,” Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art (New York: Something Else Press, 1965), p. 122, defines the premises of the form: “There is no plan for living, choices are classically subjective, irrational and emotional. Everything is by accident, an anarchous accident.” These are likewise the premises of Ubu's world, and of the Jarry line extending back to Peer Gynt, except that in happenings the ancient pretense of impersonation is usually dropped, the human (or humanistic) content is suppressed, and the “actors” are reduced to manipulators of props or, at their minimum, to inanimate adjuncts of the programmed environment. (The phrase “classically subjective” suggests interestingly the degree to which the Ubu tradition has by now been assimilated.)

¹⁵ Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, ed. by Evert Sprinchorn (New York: Hill and Wang Dramabooks, 1964), pp. 144-145. The play referred to is Emperor and Galilean, but the statement applies equally to any of the subsequent naturalistic dramas.