Word: ibsens
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...IBSEN by Michael Meyer. 865 pages. Doubleday...
...Henrik Ibsen kept a live scorpion in an empty beer glass on his writing table. "From time to time the brute would ail; then I would throw in a piece of ripe fruit, on which it would cast itself in a rage and eject its poison; then it was well again." As usual in an Ibsen scene, opera glasses are not needed to recognize the symbolism. Tiny, armored, venomous, Ibsen was an ailing spirit whose dramas stung the 19th century's conscience and gave European theater a new seriousness. After launching into poetic tragedy (Brand, Peer Gynt), Ibsen imported...
...exploitation of women, the trap of marriage, the dead weight of the Establishment, the isolation of the individual in the modern world-Ibsen's issues are once again the issues of the hour. But as his plays revive so do their somber ambiguities. To assume that the facts of an author's life inevitably illuminate the meaning of his writing is to commit the biographical fallacy; and in this huge biography-the first full portrait done since 1931-Michael Meyer makes that error on a grand scale. Even so, his book is the richest discussion of Ibsen...
Because she concentrated so fiercely on the brutalizing effects of power and money, Ivy Compton-Burnett has often been accused of being pitiless and even amoral. She was as unsparing as Ibsen in visiting the sins of parents on their children, and there are few more starkly evil women in literature than the murderous Anna Donne in Elders and Betters...
When Arthur Miller adapted Ibsen's play in 1950, he was greatly concerned about the abuses of McCarthyism. The wheel of history having turned, present-day audiences will be much more caught up in the ecological aspects of the play. It is ironic that while audiences will root for Stockmann on this contemporary issue, they would probably spurn him as an arrogant elitist if he were running for political office. As unyieldingly committed as was Ibsen himself to the prior claims of the individual conscience, intellect, character and will. Stockmann has no use for "the solid majority...