SHAKESPEARIANA. Published Quarterly under the Auspices of the Shakespeare Society of New York. No. LXXXI. JANUARY, 1892. VOL. IX. THE CROWN INN AT OXFORD, JOHN DAVENANT PROPRIETOR, London. IV. THE OLD AND LATER King John. Appleton Morgan, 30 47 57 61 VOL. IX. SHAKESPEARIANA. JANUARY, 1892. No. 1. IBSEN'S DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION COMPARED WITH SHAKESPEARE'S. * TWICE at least, in Shakespeare and in Molière, the world has seen. how the highest skill in dramatic poetry may be developed from professional familiarity with the stage, either in acting or in managing. To these two great examples, in the opinion of many critics, a third is now to be added, the Norwegian, Ibsen. For he, too, by practical experience of theatrical management learned his art of dramatic composition. And, indeed, his work as dramatic poet, whatever we may think of its higher merits, shows in every detail the skill that comes only from close professional study of the needs and conditions of theatrical presentation. He was, in fact, from 1851 to 1857 director of the theatre at Bergen, and from 1857 to 1861 director of the larger theatre at Christiana. And the best quality of his best work may be proved, I think, to be due to the practical knowledge thus acquired in the struggle of his large ideas against the small means of these poorly endowed Norwegian theatres-the knowledge of the ways of realizing, at the smallest expense in scenery and decoration, the highest effects of dramatic situation. But there was in Ibsen's own nature an element that gave to the result of these ten years of practical expression a character altogether different from the result to be observed either in Shakespeare's case or in Molière's. For by force of natural talent Ibsen was not, I think, like Molière and Shakespeare, a poet of the dramatic kind, but a poet of the lyrical kind. That is, his natural strength lay, not in observing the characters nor in representing the customs and the actions of other people, but in putting his own emotions and his own thoughts before us in forms of pure lyrical imagination. When, for example, I began, in my youth, to form acquaintance with his poetry, the charm that seized me was the charm of his intense lyrical expression. There seemed to me in those early years little that was either strong or beautiful in his dramatic *Read before the New York Shakespeare Society, May 14, 1891. |