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Updated: June 13, 2025
In several respects, though perhaps not in concentration of effect, The Lady from the Sea shows a distinct advance on Rosmersholm. It is never dull, never didactic, as its predecessor too often was, and there is thrown over the whole texture of it a glamour of romance, of mystery, of beauty, which had not appeared in Ibsen's work since the completion of Peer Gynt.
Scarcely will a voice be found to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light into the national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the national conscience, that even works like Ghosts, which shocked, and works like Rosmersholm, which insulted the prejudices of his countrymen, were excellent in their result.
It may be shaken, but it is the work of a blind Sampson, and no less, to bring it rattling to the ground. In Rosmersholm, all the modern thought, all the vitality, all the lucidity belong to Rebecca, but the decrepit formulas are stoutly intrenched.
Thirdly, and to make it short, lastly, the late Henrik Ibsen, nourished upon Munich beer, wrote "Hedda Gabler," not to mention "Rosmersholm" and "The Lady from the Sea" wrote them in his flat in the Maximilianstrasse overlooking the palace and the afternoon promenaders, in the late eighties of the present, or Christian era wrote them there and then took them to the Café Luitpold, in the Briennerstrasse, to ponder them, polish them and make them perfect.
In Peer Gynt, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in An Enemy of the People, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for Ghosts and Rosmersholm, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece are sufficient. It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the subject of nomenclature.
Fiske and the members of her skilfully selected company in Henrik Ibsen's dreary and depressing Rosmersholm, I went home and sought solace from a reperusal of an old play, by the buoyant and healthy Thomas Heywood, which is sweetly named The Fair Maid of the West.
Fiske should sacrifice vraisemblance to a meaningless refinement. In the second act of "Rosmersholm," to take a single instance, the text calls for a morning wrapper, a thing so manifestly careless and informal that the school-master, Kroll, is scandalized at seeing Rebecca in it, and says so plainly. But as Mrs.
Rosmersholm is of all the social plays of Ibsen the least interesting to witness on the stage, because the spectator is left entirely in the dark concerning the character and the motives of Rebecca West until her confession at the close of the third act, and can therefore understand the play only on a second seeing.
But he would reopen the door to allegory and symbol, and especially to fantastic beauty of landscape. The landscape of Rosmersholm has all, or at least much, of the old enchantment. The scene at the mill-dam links us once more with the woods and the waters which we had lost sight of since Peer Gynt. But this element was still more evident in The Lady from the Sea, which was. published in 1888.
It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer the erregende Moment, the joining of issue, from the second act to the first. In his early draft of Rosmersholm, the great scene in which Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the play gained enormously by the transference.
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