The Works of Henrik Ibsen. Volume VII: The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, the Master Builder

1968 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 776
Author(s):  
Brian W. Downs ◽  
James Walter McFarlane ◽  
Henrik Ibsen
Keyword(s):  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Master Builder

Robins, Elizabeth (1862–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne E. Gates
Keyword(s):  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Stage Management ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Joint Management ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Nora Helmer ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
A Doll's House

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1862, Elizabeth Robins established herself in the American theater and then relocated to London in 1888. She epitomizes the grasp that the plays of Henrik Ibsen held on performers in the 1890s. Indeed, she outshone other professionals by laying claim to performing and producing the first English-speaking Hedda Gabler (1891) and the first Hilda Wangel (1893, in The Master Builder). She felt that the stage-management system prevented women from having a say in their profession, and therefore she welcomed the Independent Theatre Movement. She formed the Joint Management Company with American actress Marion Lea, her stage partner and co-producer for Hedda Gabler, and she organized several subscription series to mount not only Ibsen’s plays but also other artistic theater. Her feminist play Votes for Women (1907) was at the vanguard of pro-suffrage drama. Performances organized by Robins of Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder were rivaled in impact only by the initial sensation created by Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer in her London production of A Doll’s House in 1889. Robins’ other Ibsen roles included Martha in The Pillars of Society, Asta in Little Eyolf, Agnes in a production of Act 4 of Brand, Ella Reintheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs Linde in A Doll’s House, and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm.

Archer, William (1856–1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Postlewait
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
A Doll's House

Born in Edinburgh, William Archer served as a London theater critic from 1881 to 1920. He retired from weekly reviewing when his melodrama The Green Goddess was a major success in New York (1920–1922) and London (1923–1924). His translations of Henrik Ibsen’s plays began to be published in 1888 and culminated in The Works of Henrik Ibsen (twelve volumes, 1906–1908). He translated and helped to stage the first London productions of A Doll’s House (1889), Ghosts (1891), and Rosmersholm (1892), and in close partnership with the actress Elizabeth Robins co-directed the productions of Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893), Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1898). He also translated and published plays by Maurice Maeterlinck and Gerhart Hauptmann. In his advocacy for modern English drama, Archer supported the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, Oscar Wilde, James Barrie, Harley Granville Barker, and Bernard Shaw. He led the British campaigns against stage censorship and for a national theater. In 1907 he and Barker published A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates. In the mid-1880s he and Shaw drafted a play entitled Rhinegold that Shaw later transformed into Widowers’ Houses (1892), the play that launched his playwriting career. Between 1892 and 1924 Archer wrote well over 100 articles and reviews on Shaw and his plays. Although he criticized some of the plays, he repeatedly praised Shaw as a modern dramatic genius. Their abiding friendship thrived on their debates about all aspects of modern drama, including Shaw’s plays. In 1923 Archer published The Old Drama and the New, a historical survey of British drama with a lengthy (and still argumentative) section on Shaw.

Concluding Remarks

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-202
Author(s):  
Kristin Gjesdal
Keyword(s):  
Late Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Dense Image ◽  
Master Builder

After Hedda Gabler, Ibsen wrote four more plays: The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken. With its darker tone and dense, image-laden prose, his late work has been described as melancholy. In each of these late plays, the topic of the past, of individual and collective history, features centrally. At least two of the late plays—three, if we include ...

scholarly journals Editorial Foreword

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-6
Author(s):  
Silviu-Marian Miloiu
Keyword(s):  
Social Services ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
National Languages ◽  
Editorial Foreword

Volume 8, issue no. 1 (2016) of Revista Română de Studii Baltice şi Nordice/ The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies (RRSBN) gathers articles dealing with history, literary history and literary studies. The first group of articles engaged with topics related to Nordic and Baltic history from the early Middle Ages to the Modern Age. Such is the article which opens the journal signed by Costel Coroban. His thesis is that Konungs skuggsjá (King’s Mirror or Speculum Regale), the piece of work elaborated in 1250 under King Hákon Hákonarson (1217-1263) for his son, future King Magnús lagabœtir (1263-1280), emphasizes piety as one of the essential features of a good Christian. Cases of arrogance and individualism have to be chastened and that was one of the essential attributes and duties of a sovereign. Roxana-Ema Dreve tackles the national identity building in Norway following the separation from Denmark and the creation of a union with Sweden. The article addresses the 1830s’ developments especially with regard to the puzzling debate on the spoken and written national languages and the polemics of Henrik Wergeland and Johan Sebastian Welhaven. Henrik Ibsen continues to inspire inquiries in fields such as literature, social sciences, culture, philosophy as he did when he lived. Gianina Druță studies Ibsen’s masterpiece Hedda Gabler inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s concepts such as deterritorialisation, antigenealogy, rhizome or alliance. Dalia Bukelevičiūtė opens new perspectives in the field of social and welfare of Lithuanian population in Latvia during the interwar period and points out to the unbalanced situation between the two neighboring states of Latvia and Lithuania. While the number of Latvians in Lithuania who needed social protection was meagre, the number of Lithuanians in Latvia was considerable. This posed difficulties to the Lithuanian Government confronted, on one hand, with the needs of Lithuanians, the higher expenses of social services in Latvia and the desire to keep up the Lithuanian identity of the population across the border. This resulted into a wavering policy of the Lithuanian Governments which, however, always returned to the Convention on social assistance concluded with the Latvian counterparts in 1924. This issue of our journal continues to tackle the perceptions of Nordic peoples on Romania, in this case Mihaela Mehedinţi-Beiean depicting the Nordic and Russian travellers’ recollections of corruption and political instability imbedded into the Phanariot system of the 18th century Romania. Finally, this issue brings to the fore a Norwegian personality with a significant role in the Romanian-Norwegian relations, author of chapters, articles and books dealing with this topic: Jardar Seim. Crina Leon successfully sails through the memories of Professor Seim’s first encounters of Romania and the developments of this interest into a research topic.

An American Actress at Balmoral

1977 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Michael Jamieson
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Railway Line ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Terminal Station

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 25 October 1893, a well-dressed young woman alighted at the terminal station of the Great North of Scotland Railway line to Ballater. A discerning London playgoer, seeing her in the unlikely setting of this remote Scots village, would have recognised the stranger as Elizabeth Robins, one of the three most ‘interesting’ and advanced actresses of the day. American by birth and early stage training, she had passed through London in the summer of 1888 on her way to and from a Norwegian holiday and, encouraged by Oscar Wilde, she had remained to try her luck in the English theatre. Her moment had come in April 1891 when she had triumphantly created Hedda Gabler on the British stage, and early in 1893 – a year she afterwards referred to as ‘outstanding’ – she had won a still greater triumph when she acted Hilda Wangel in her own presentation of The Master Builder. Pioneering matinées, however, could not in themselves support an independent, impecunious and expatriate actress, and Miss Robins, who was now thirty-one, had appeared in two Adelphi melodramas as well as for fashionable actor–managers. In May of this very year she had magnanimously yielded the dazzling part of Paula in Pinero's new and adult drama The Second Mrs Tanqueray to her friend Mrs Patrick Campbell and so had lost, perhaps for ever, the chance of becoming a celebrated and modish actress.

scholarly journals Imagining Hedda Gabler: Munch and Ibsen on Art and Modern Life

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Kristin Gjesdal
Keyword(s):  
Set Design ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The University

Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the sketch is given the title Geniuses. Munch’s sketch shows Ibsen, who had died a few years earlier, in the company of Socrates and Nietzsche. The picture was a working sketch for a painting commissioned by the University. While Munch, in the end, chose a different motif for his commission, it is nonetheless significant that he found it appropriate to portrait the Norwegian dramatist in the company of key European philosophers, indeed the whole span of the European philosophical tra­dition from its early beginnings to its most controversial spokesman in the late 1800s. In my article, I seek to take seriously Munch’s bold and original positioning of Ibsen in the company of philosophers. Focusing on Hedda Gabler—a play about love lost and lives unlived—I explore the aesthetic-philosophical ramifications of Ibsen’s peculiar position between realism and modernism. This position, I suggest, is also reflected in Munch’s sketches for the set design for Hermann Bahr’s 1906 production of the play.

scholarly journals Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Rebecca Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Women ◽  
Woman Character ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Cultural Medium ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Doll's House

“Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch” examines four comic parodies of Ibsen written by Thomas Antsey Guthrie, a British journalist and humourist also known as F. Antsey. The plays examined include parodies of Rosmersholm, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder — comically abbreviated renditions of Ibsen originals that featured striking new women characters. Reading these parodies as responses to their originals, I examine what happens to the new woman character when she is subjected to comic parodic treatment. Although the parodies do not directly focus on the alteration of these key female characters, I argue that Antsey’s parodic critique of Ibsenian dramaturgical mechanics, conventions, and tropes indirectly impacted their representation, transforming them from tragic heroines to comic figures and raising further questions about the relationship between gender and comedy. In each parody, the psychological complexity of the new woman character is compromised through Antsey’s alteration of one or more of her key purposes within Ibsen’s text. Overall, I argue that the reassessment and reinterpretation of these key Norwegian texts can be viewed as a mode of transition between Ibsen and those impacted and influenced by him, providing a cultural medium or “buffer” that helped connect the notably “serious” Scandinavian playwright with British audiences.

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-326
Author(s):  
Laurence Raw
Keyword(s):  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Hedda Gabler
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