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Updated: June 7, 2025
In general it may be said that any pause in the action emphasises by position the speech or business that immediately preceded it. This is true not only of the long pause at the end of an act: the point is illustrated just as well by an interruption of the play in mid-career, like Mrs. Fiske's ominous and oppressive minute of silence in the last act of Hedda Gabler.
The play is not so profound in its humanity as The Wild Duck, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will repay the closest study. We need not look closely at the remaining plays. Hedda Gabler is perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the present is most successfully preserved.
"Kin you hold back when the brichin' breaks? Kin you stop fer orders when your nigh hind leg's over your trace an' ye feel good of a frosty mornin'?" said Nip, who had only learned that trick last winter, and thought it was the crown of horsely knowledge. "What's the use o' talk in'?" said Tedda Gabler, scornfully. "What kin ye do?"
The butcher boy enjoys Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street: why should he disbelieve my statement that others get pleasure from a performance of a Hedda Gabler, which would hardly appeal to him?
He found his characters and his themes in modern life and in his native land; and the social dramas followed one another in steady succession, 'Pillars of Society' , 'A Doll's House' , 'Ghosts' , 'An Enemy of the People' , the 'Wild Duck' , 'Rosmersholm' , the 'Lady from the Sea' , 'Hedda Gabler' , the 'Master-Builder' , 'Little Eyolf' , 'John Gabriel Borkman' and 'When We Dead Awaken' .
And another device, that of the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early 'League of Youth, is so delicately utilized in certain of the later plays witness, the "vine-leaves in his hair" of 'Hedda Gabler' and the "white horses" in 'Rosmersholm' that these recurrent phrases are transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner's leading-motives.
The comedy of types necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and Molière in spite of Alceste and Don Juan is characteristically a character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas, Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul.
Nowadays the four-act form with a strong climax at the end of the third act seems to be most often used. This is the form, for instance, of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, of Mr. Jones's Mrs. Dane's Defense, and of Sir Arthur Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, and The Gay Lord Quex. Each begins with an act of exposition, followed by an act of rising interest.
A Berlin dramatic critic, going through the motions of reviewing a new performance of "Hedda Gabler" the other morning, finally dismissed the matter as "Women's troubles if anybody can be interested in that nowadays!"
A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame Alla Nazimova, who has had special opportunities of studying the part of Hedda Gabler, has lately depicted her as "aristocratic and ill-mated, ambitious and doomed to a repulsive alliance with a man beneath her station, whom she had mistakenly hoped would give her position and wealth.
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