Word: ibsens
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...Woman was born in Ibsen's inkwell. When Nora slammed the door on hubby and the kiddies in the last scene of A Doll's House, wives all over the Western world began mentally packing their suitcases. The idea behind Nora's leaving was lofty. Woman was no longer to be a possession, a commodity, a glorified nursemaid, a kept dilettante on the sidelines of the world's imposing work. She would forge her own identity and earn something called "respect." The amusing thing about this, as G. K. Chesterton once pointed out, was that...
...group; a star or two will not suffice. Here Chekhov has done away with the clear spine that drives through the play from one exciting event to another, from one "sock on the jaw" (Chekhov's phrase) to another; he has turned his back on the technique of say, Ibsen and Strindberg. He has, in effect, turned from the solo concerto with orchestra to the more subtle and contrapuntal interplay of chamber music...
...truncheon." The enemy, in Toynbee's view, is not simply the Establishment or the Kremlin or the Pentagon but "competitive Individualism, bee-like or antlike Communism, and tribal-minded Nationalism." Such things, Toynbee argues, are responsible for creating "a Boyg-like smog of impersonal relations." Readers of Ibsen's Peer Gynt are expected to recall that the great Boyg is a shapeless cloud "neither dead nor alive; all slime and mistiness." There is really no way to get at Boyg; he "doesn't strike" and prefers to "get all he wishes by gentleness." Ibsen's folk...
...Preacher-Teachers. Like Christ, he preaches to publicans and sinners, synonyms for playgoers. All the preacher-teacher-playwrights - Ibsen, Shaw, Arthur Miller-are gluttons for sinners. They want converts streaming up the aisles to purify the world. They are all moral abolitionists who, despite their obvious love of the theater, confuse drama with reform and statecraft. They write Plays to Abolish Things By-poverty, prejudice, war, injustice, capitalism, moral obliquity. This is the dramatic form of preventive medicine, and it has never averted a single plague that mankind is heir...
...godless degenerates. Licensing became an official duty of the Chamberlain in 1737, when Prime Minister Robert Walpole grew so outraged by the political lampoons of Henry Fielding that he forced through a new censorship law. Since then, the Lords Chamberlain have had unchallengeable authority to ban plays by Ibsen (Ghosts), Shaw (Mrs. Warren's Profession), Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), Arthur Miller (A View From the Bridge) and Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). The most notable modern playwright to run afoul of the Lord Chamberlain is John Osborne. One of his plays dealing...