Ibsen in EnglandFour Seas Company, 1919 - 195 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
Achurch acting actors admirable Alving Athenaeum audience Bernick Brand character Charles Fulton Charrington Court Theatre Courtenay Thorpe Dead Awaken Doll's House dramatist edition Emperor and Galilean Enemy English drama English stage formance Ghosts Gina Gosse Gosse's Grein Hedda Gabler Hedvig Henrik Ibsen Herdal Hilda Ibsen controversy Ibsen in England Ibsen's dramas Ibsen's plays Ibsenites Incorporated Stage Society Independent Theatre Inger of Ostrat John Gabriel Borkman Jones Judge Brack June Krogstad Lady Inger Laurence Irving League of Youth Linden Little Eyolf London Lövborg Love's Comedy Master Builder matinees Miss Achurch Miss Elizabeth Robins Miss Janet Achurch Miss Robins Nora Norway Norwegian Oscar Asche Patrick Campbell Peer Gynt performance Pillars of Society Pinero playwrights poem poet praised presented produced prose realism Rosmer Rosmersholm satire Scott Shaw Shaw's Signora Solness Stockmann Tesman Thea theatrical critic tion Torvald Helmer Vikings at Helgeland Volume Walkley Wangel Wild Duck William Archer
Popular passages
Page 38 - March 1891, and is supplemented by a leading article which compares the play to an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly, or a lazar house with all its doors and windows open.
Page 130 - We have to unlearn, therefore, our long disregard of the theatre; we have to own that the theatre is irresistible. But I see our community turning to the theatre with eagerness, and finding the English theatre without organization, or purpose, or dignity, and no modern English drama at all except a fantastical one.
Page 130 - For we are at the end of a period, and have to deal with the facts and symptoms of a new period on which we are entering; and prominent among these fresh facts and symptoms is the irresistibility of the theatre. We know how the Elizabethan theatre had its cause in an ardent zest for life and living, a bold and large curiosity, a desire for a fuller...
Page 140 - European drama, not only from the minor conventions of the stage, such as the perfunctory aside * and the perfunctory soliloquy, but from the deadlier bondage of sentimentality, of one-eyed optimism, and sham morality. As there is no modern playwright who understands his craft that does not pay homage to Ibsen's technique, so there is no serious modern dramatist who has not been directly or indirectly influenced by him, and whose path has not been made clearer, and straighter, and easier by Ibsen's...
Page 79 - Take a piece of music, omit all the harmonies, break up and rearrange the melodic phrases, and then play them with your forefinger on the pianoforte —do this, and you will have some idea of the process to which Messrs. Jones and Herman have subjected "A Doll's House.
Page 35 - I was surprised that I, who had made it my chief life-task to depict human characters and human destinies, should, without conscious or direct intention, have arrived in several matters at the same conclusions as the social-democratic moral philosophers had arrived at by scientific processes.
Page 18 - Love's Comedy, Brand, and Peer Gynt, despite their varied plots, form a great satiric trilogy — perhaps for sustained vigour of expression, for affluence of execution, and for brilliance of dialogue, the greatest of modern times. They form, at present, Ibsen's principal and foremost claim to immortality; their influence over thought in the North has been boundless, and, sooner or later, they will win for their author the homage of Europe.
Page 27 - But, save for this accident of time, it was Mr. Archer and no other who was really the introducer of Ibsen to English readers. For a quarter of a century he was the protagonist in the fight against misconstruction and stupidity; with wonderful courage, with not less wonderful good temper and persistency, he insisted on making the true Ibsen take the place of the false, and on securing for him the recognition due to his genius.
Page 35 - He selects subjects which seem to him to illustrate such and such political, ethical, or sociological ideas; but he does not profess to have invented the ideas. They are common property; they are in the air. A grave injustice has been done him of late by those of his English admirers who have set him up as a social prophet, and have sometimes omitted to mention that he is a bit of a poet as well. It is so much easier to import an idea than the flesh and blood, the imagination, the passion, the style...
Page 87 - ... Independent Theatre, the first performance of which elicited no less than five hundred articles, mostly vituperating Ibsen, whose Ghosts inaugurated the movement, and obtained for me the honorary, if somewhat unflattering, title of ' the best-abused man in London.' In parenthesis, I should add here that this distinction clung to me for many years, that some families closed their doors against me because I had produced an immoral play, and that a well-known journalist, since dead, refused to be...