Genesis and Reception free essay sample

Hedda Gabler was the last of Ibsens plays to be published while he was living abroad. It was written in Munich in 1890. It is uncertain when Ibsen first had the idea that resulted in Hedda Gabler. But according to some researchers, Ibsen’s relations with Emilie Bardach led the playwright to think of writing Hedda Gabler. But we cannot make any such claim with certainty. Though there are some references in their mutual correspondence about a play yet we cannot guess that the play referred in the letters of Ibsen and Emilie is Hedda Gabler or some other play. A fairly large amount of material on Hedda Gabler – notes, sketches of plans, drafts – has been preserved, but most of it is undated. For example, the first draft of the play is entitled Hedda and the first act is undated. But the second act has a date on it i. e. August 13th 1890. Later on, Ibsen put this draft aside and on September 6th he started a fresh draft of the second act. Other dates in this manuscript show that on October 22nd the fair copy of the first act was completed. The completion date of the play, according to a letter of Ibsen to August Larsen, was November 16, 1890. Ibsen also changed the name of the play from ‘Hedda’ to Hedda Gabler’, later on. In a letter dated December 4th 1890 to Moritz Prozor, who translated the play into French, Ibsen explained why he had chosen Gabler instead of Tesman: â€Å"In that way I wanted to indicate that as a personality she is to be regarded more as her fathers daughter than her husbands wife†. The first edition of Hedda Gabler was published by Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag in Copenhagen and Christiania on December 16th 1890. For the first time, Hedda Gabler was performed in Germany, in Munich, on January 31, 1891. It was not a success. Ibsen himself was in the audience, and was very deeply distressed by the heavily declamatory style of the actress. Later performances in France, and Scandinavia also failed. The main reason for the failure was the character of Hedda, which remained enigmatic for most of the directors and the actresses who performed the role of Hedda. In April of 1891, however, a remarkable English production became the first to really unleash the plays theatrical possibilities. The guiding spirit behind the production was a young woman named Elizabeth Robins, a talented but unknown American actress then living in London. In the beginning, the play Hedda Gabler did not receive any encouraging response from the critics. Most of the critics found the character of Hedda â€Å"enigmatic† and â€Å"incomprehensible†. Its fragmented, disjointed language, its rambling conversations in which much of the story is communicated sub-textually, its tone of tragicomic nihilism and above all, its enigmatic, brooding heroine all marked such advances in dramatic technique as to render it nearly incomprehensible to many of its early readers. Most of the literary critics castigated the main character of the play. In the newspaper Morgenbladet Alfred Sinding-Larsen wrote: â€Å"All in all, Hedda Gabber can hardly be called anything but a sinister creature of the imagination, the authors own creation of a monster in the shape of a woman, without any corresponding model in the real world†. The newspaper ‘The Ledger’ from Philadelphia, wrote: â€Å"What a hopeless specimen of degeneracy is Hedda Gabler! A vicious, heartless, cowardly, unmoral, mischief-making vixen. † Another newspaper, Sun New York wrote: â€Å"What a marvel of stupidity and nonsense the author did produce in this play! It is incredible to think that only a score of years ago the audience sat seriously before its precious dullness. † Elizabeth Robins’ performance of Hedda Gabler in London proved an important milestone towards the popularity and the understanding of the play. It also helped the critics to view the play in different context and praised Ibsen’s dramaturgy in Hedda Gabler. The major breakthrough in this regard was the critical essay of Henry James â€Å"On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler†. It was widely re-printed and read. John Gassner said in his ‘Masters of the Drama’: â€Å"Ibsen created a masterpiece in Hedda Gabler, a crystal-clear example of a maladjusted woman†¦ No doubt she existed in the past, but her specific type is undeniably modern. † Justin Huntly McCarthy praised ‘Hedda Gabler’: â€Å"Ibsen’s greatest play, and the most interesting woman that he has created — she is compact with all the vices, she is instinct with all the virtues, of womanhood. † The most comprehensive criticism on Hedda Gabler came from G. B. Shaw. He wrote in his ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ â€Å"Hedda must be viewed within the constellation of the supplementary characters that Ibsen supplied with more calculation than may be suspected. Judge Brack is her male counterpart and may serve to remind us that Hedda draws her frailties not merely from woman but from the human race. That Hedda married a Tesman instead of joining her fate to the Dionysian Loevborg is surely indicative of fundamental Philistinism. Like so many of her sisters, she plays safe. Hedda’s situation stems from her character, a fact Ibsen forces upon us by drawing her opposite in Mrs. Elvsted. The sophisticated Hedda is cowardly whereas the un-emancipated, feminine Mrs. Elvsted behaves like a brave ‘new woman’, leaving her husband and children in order to protect the man she saved from drink and despair. Because she has inner resources, she can continue to live after Loevborg’s suicide. Hedda can only die. Women like Hedda tail more usually, as well as more crushingly by hanging on to life and avenging their frustration on others. The tragedy of a Hedda in real life, Bernard Shaw remarked, is not that she commits suicide but that she continues to live! † In fact, the character of Hedda has always been a challenging role for the directors and actresses. Moreover, there have been multifarious approaches in staging Hedda Gabler. Hedda has been seen traditionally as a Circe, a destructive and almost demonic force. More recently, attempts have been made to see Hedda as a victim of societal expectations or conventions. Some directors have seen the play in even more radical terms, as an all-encompassing denunciation of bourgeois society, while still others have chosen to focus on Heddas madness, and seen the play as a study of psychosexual repression.