Word: ibsens
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...outline would perhaps suggest a tragedy. Yet Ibsen's title is well chosen, and the play even has a happy ending for everyone. Contrary to the consensus, there was much humor in Ibsen himself and in his plays, though in the latter it resulted more from comic characters than from comic situations. Still, hearty laughter is absent; and disturbing arriere-pensees always lurk in the offing...
Love's Comedy is Ibsen's first major achievement (1862). This production is its New England and, apparently, its American premiere. In this rhymed-verse drama Ibsen, forsaking all his chauvinistic trumpeting, deals for the first time with "social problems," a concern on which his reputation largely rests. Specifically, it is a satire on love, courtship and marriage. It supports the thesis that a happy marriage demands the absence of love and that a lasting love exists only extramaritally; and it presents, through the mouth of the merchant Guldstad, a strong argument for mariages de convenance...
This philosophy, as a matter of fact, was responsible for much of Ibsen's self-doubt. If Kierkegaard was right, then Ibsen as an aesthetic artist was destined to stay in the inferior class. I daresay that his auspicious shift to the "problem play" owed a great deal to his conviction that in this way he would be performing social and ethical acts, which would raise him on Kierkegaard's ladder of human worth...
Love's Comedy originally engendered violent outbursts of indignation. And no small part of it was aimed at Ibsen for daring to bring a clergyman on stage. But Ibsen went still further and made him the butt of satire, epitomized by the fact that the pastor has twelve children, eight of whom troop back and forth through the set--all of them girls--and his wife is again pregnant (and will doubtless present him with a thirteenth girl...
...pioneering work, which profoundly influenced Bernard Shaw's Getting Married and Candida, is not a great one. There is virtually no action; and the characters are on the whole rather two-dimensional. The entrances and exits are handled somewhat awkwardly; and the play's focus is not consistently clear. Ibsen had not yet reached that lofty fin-de-siecle peak that only Strindberg would eventually share with him. Nevertheless, no other play of Ibsen has so much sparkle and wit as Love's Comedy...