Chapter 4 Ibsens Influence on Early Twentieth Century Drama

In the drama then, we may depend on it that though we shall not have another Ibsen, yet
nobody will write for the stage after as most playwrights wrote before him.
-

Bernard Shaw1

Ibsens direct influence on succeeding dramatists is often hard to gauge; Ibsen was not
the founder of Naturalism, the honour belongs to Zola, and it is possible that realist ideas
could have come from a number of other sources. Ibsen was the first Naturalist, and to a
lesser extent Symbolist, writer for the stage and outside of France it is hard to find a
dramatist of either school who was unaware of the Norwegians work when they began.
After the mid 1880s the number of modern dramatists increased rapidly, as can be seen in
the new names coming to the stage of the independent theatres, and so the influences to
be drawn from was forever growing. By the outbreak of World War I there was such an
eclectic mix of modern drama to choose from, that tracing an influence directly to Ibsen
is almost impossible. Therefore I will be looking at the early Bernard Shaw, William
Butler Yeats and Elizabeth Robins who respectively represent a leading example of
Naturalist, Symbolist and Womans suffrage drama; they also all came to prominence in
the first decade of the twentieth century, shortly after Ibsens triumph on the English
stage. Each also discovered Ibsens influence from very different angles; Shaw found
Ibsens work to be an excellent model for his new drama and was one of the early
London Ibsenites; Yeats found Ibsen to be lacking in certain areas and, in part, sought to
address these deficiencies in his own work; finally Robins, as an actress, was inspired by
the power and freedom of the roles that Ibsen created, particularly his female characters,
and was encouraged to continue this in her own work.
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Shaws interest, support and defence of Ibsen has been quite well documented
already in this easy, but when he took up playwriting the Norwegian dramatist was to
have a direct impact on his early works collectively known as Plays Unpleasant. These
were his first three plays, each written for the Independent Theatre, although only one
was ever produced there, Widowers Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs Warrens
Profession. Shaw was often happy to acknowledge his debt to Ibsen, as in his article, in
1921, in which he stated, since Wagner and Ibsen restored the theatre to its ancient
throne, many things have happened there. For instance, I myself have turned playwright
in order to carry on Ibsens work; and I have been as furiously abused, and am quite as
thoroughly misunderstood as he was.2 At other times, Shaw attempted to distance
himself from being seen as Ibsens disciple, [Ibsens] effects were first discovered by the
press in a play of mine performed in 1892, which was written in 1885, before I knew of
Ibsens existence. [] I need not tell readers of the Clarion that all those ideas of mine
which are so freely attributed to Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Strindberg and Nietzsche,
were hammered out by British Socialists long before the London Press began to chatter
about them.3 From this I feel that Shaw was happy to admit Ibsens influence on his
work, providing he was not labelled as a disciple and was given the credit he felt he
deserved, and justifiably so, for his own independent contribution and thought. Shaws
greatest contribution to the Ibsen debate was his essay The Quintessence of Ibsenism, first
delivered as a lecture in 1890 and consistently updated; upon Ibsens death it contained a
play by play analysis of all Ibsens later work from Brand onwards, as well as a general
background to the Norwegians art. Although at times Shaw is inclined to find his own
personal politics in Ibsens work, the essay stands as the first complete piece of Ibsen

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criticism in England and shows the depths to which Shaw was aware and understood his
work. Ibsen and Shaw share in common their detrimental view of middle-class
respectability and both satirise and attack the Norwegian and English attitudes
respectively, although their sense of humour was quite different. Widowers Houses the
first great native performance of the Independent Theatre was a politically didactic play
and as such the theme was not one common to Ibsen, depending, perhaps, on how we
read The League of Youth. The play is, however, naturalistic and the use of discussion is
something Shaw attributed to Ibsen. The Philanderer can not hide its debt to Ibsen, Act II
is set inside an Ibsen Club in London. Although often satirical, for me the play presents
us with some English equivalents of certain Ibsen characters and examines the effects of
Ibsens ideas on both the old and the new generations. In a prefatory note to a new
version in 1930, Shaw acknowledges this and demonstrates just how important he
believed the ideas of Ibsen to be:
The state of mind represented by the Ibsen Club in this play was familiar then to our Intelligentsia.
That far more numerous body which may be called the Unintelligentsia was as unconscious of
Ibsen as of any other political influence: quarter of a century elapsed before an impatient heaven
rained German bombs down on them to wake them from their apathy. That accustomed them to
much more startling departures from Victorian routine than those that shock the elderly colonel
and the sentimental theatre critic in The Philanderer; but they do not associate their advance in
liberal morals with the great Norwegian. Even the Intelligentsia have forgotten that the lesson that
might have saved the lives of ten million persons hideously slaughtered was offered to them by
Ibsen.4

It is debateable whether acceptance of Ibsens ideas could have averted World War I, but
it goes to highlight the influence and belief Shaw felt in the Norwegian. Mrs Warrens
Profession presents a study in a young independent womans discovery that all her
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education, money and independence has come from her mothers unnamed profession
prostitution. It caused a sensation to rival Ghosts and just like Ibsens play poses
questions of heredity and inheritance. In his later plays Shaw developed his own very
unique style but his early debt to Ibsen can not be overlooked.
Yeats is an interesting and difficult example of Ibsens influence on drama.
Superficially, at least, the two can be seen as worlds apart. Yeats was a Symbolist and
believed that the most important aspect for the stage was language, for him drama should
speak the eternal language of the soul not the common everyday language of physical
life. All other aspects of the drama should work to accentuate the language: music should
accompany the rhythm of speech, movement should be limited or rhythmic to emphasise
speech, and the colour of costume and scenery must work to draw attention to the speech.
This is a stark contrast to Ibsens presentations of real people on the stage speaking in
real voices with realistic scenery. In this respect Yeats is an antithesis of Ibsen. Yeats was
somewhat disillusioned by Naturalism in which he could find no room for the soul and
the beauty of life and so he is inspired by Ibsen to offer an alternative world view to that
of Ibsens Naturalism. However, there are also a number of similarities in some of their
aims and themes. In Yeats view Truth and beauty judge and are above judgement. They
justify and have no need of justification.5 Again, Yeats is addressing the individual
Truth already seen in Brusteins account of Ibsen and the ideas of Brahm. Yeats
witnessed the English premieres of both A Dolls House (1889) and Ghosts (1891) and in
Ibsen, he for the first time found Truth on the stage, what he was yet to find was the
Beauty that accompanies it.
The utmost sincerity, the most unbroken logic, give me, at any rate, but an imperfect pleasure if
there is not a vivid and beautiful language. Ibsen has sincerity and logic beyond any writer of our

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time, and we are seeking to learn them at his hands; but is he not a good deal less than the greatest
of all times, because he lacks beautiful and vivid language?6

For Yeats, even the early Symbolists, particularly Maeterlinck, could not offer him the
Beauty he was seeking, and it was to Shakespeare, Calderon and Ancient Greece that he
looked for inspiration. Ibsen also offered another precedent for Yeats in his search for
national identity. Until 1905 Norway was in a forced union to Sweden and Ibsen was
keen to assert his own nationality writing all of his plays in Norwegian. Similarly, Ireland
was under English rule until 1921 and Yeats desired a national Irish theatre and
encouraged the production of Gaelic plays. Yeats was openly nationalistic and
acknowledged the influence and incentives Norwegian writers, notably Ibsen and
Bjrnson, could offer to the Irish stage.
In the small nations which have to struggle for their National life, one finds that almost every
creator, whether poet or novelist, sets all his stories in his own country. I do not recollect that
Bjrnson ever wrote of any land but Norway, and Ibsen, though he lived in exile for many years,
driven out by his countrymen, as he believed, carried the little seaboard towns of Norway
everywhere in his imagination. So far as we can be certain of anything, we may be certain that
Ireland with her long National struggle, her old literature, her unbounded folk-imagination, will, in
so far as her literature is National at all, be more like Norway than like England or France.

Comparing the plays of Ibsen and Yeats does not tend to uncover these influences
implicitly or explicitly, except in isolated cases. Even Peer Gynt and Brand, Ibsens
poetic folk plays, often seem miles away from the folk-lore and poetry of Yeats, yet
Ibsens drama remained powerful and Yeats could be described as evolving Ibsen whilst
pursuing his own unique style.
Elizabeth Robins first experiences of the stage came as an actress in both her
native America and later in England where she spent much of her life. Her first contact
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with Ibsen came when she saw Janet Achurch play the lead role in the 1889 premiere of
A Dolls House, she found Nora to be the first woman on stage not playing a beggar not
to be wearing new clothes.7 Robins was so impressed that she began learning Norwegian
in order to read the dramatist in his own tongue and was one of three, with Gosse and
Archer, commissioned with the translation of The Master Builder. Robins and a friend
Marion Lea had entertained a hope of escape from the need to accept the conditions of
the existing theatre8 and Ibsen seemed to offer them this chance, they decided to produce
Hedda Gabler and at the time had no idea where it would take them.
If we had been thinking politically, concerning ourselves about the emancipation of women, we
would not have given the Ibsen plays the particular kind of whole-hearted, enchanted devotion we
did give. We were actresses actresses who wouldnt for a kingdom be anything else. We got
over that; but I am talking about 89-91. How were we to find fault with a state of society that had
given us Nora and Hedda and Thea? Unlike Mlle Brandes, whom I was later to see playing Hedda
in Paris, Marion and I never thought of there being anything difficult to understand in the Ibsen
women till people challenged them. Then in sheer self-defence we became controversial.9

During the 1890s Robins would also appear in a revival of A Dolls House, as Hilda
Wangel in The Master Builder, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Agnes in the fourth act of
Brand, Rita and then Asta in Little Eyolf, and Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman;
Robins also played the lead role in her first play Alans Wife. By 1900 Robins had
withdrew from the stage to write novels under the pseudonym C.E. Raimond. The former
actress came late to the suffrage movement in 1906, and in 1907 published a new play,
Votes for Women!, which became the force behind the creation of the Actresses
Franchise League in 1908 and in the same year Robins became the first President of the
Women Writers Suffrage League. Alans Wife, although based on a Swedish short story,
Befraid by Elin Ameen, was in Robins and Mrs Hugh Bells dramatisation very Ibsen69

esque in treatment with stark realism and a gloomy and prison-like atmosphere. Votes for
Women! was praised for its realism, particularly in the crowd scene and draws on Robins
experiences of both Ibsen and the suffrage movement. The main influence and appeal of
Ibsen to Robins was his dominant female roles and the great opportunities he presented
for actresses playing the parts this can be seen in her own venture into playwriting.
Incidentally, or not, Norway was the first country in the world to grant full suffrage to
women in 1913.
These three examples show the diversity of Ibsens influence, but one could
discover a whole host of modern drama influenced by the great Norwegian and equally
find a collection of plays that bear little inspiration from him. Remembering the
discussion on how influence is diluted and dispersed through generations exposed to
exponentially emerging work, this essay could easily have pursued interesting studies
into the influence of Ibsen on the work of Chekhov, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Brieux and
Synge or any of the other dramatists who appeared on one of the European or America
independent theatre stages. Restrictions on space, as well as a lack of translated material
has excluded them from this essay, and I also feel that, with the exception of Synge, their
effect on the development of the early modern English stage is not as direct as that of the
authors considered in depth. Ibsens influence is sometimes obvious, but often subtle and
his ideas of theme and style can still be found throughout modern drama today; I am not
proposing that he is the most influential in every case but his work changed the theatre
forever, and as Bernard Shaw said in the opening quote of this chapter, nobody would
write after him as they wrote before him.
1

Bernard Shaw The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1904; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1994) p.75

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Bernard Shaw The Post-Ibsen Renascence of the Drama (1921; repr. Wisenthal (ed.), Shaw and Ibsen)
p.247
3
Bernard Shaw Obituary Article pp.241-242
4
Bernard Shaw Plays Unpleasant (1931, repr. London: Penguin Books, 2000) p.98
5
W.B. Yeats Plays and Controversies (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1924) p.46
6
. Ibid. p.118
7
Elizabeth Robins Ibsen and the Actress p.10
8
Henry James Theatre and Freindship: Some Henry James Letters with a Commentary by Elizabeth Robins
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1932) p.29
9
Elizabeth Robins Ibsen and the Actress pp. 31-32

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