Ghosts

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Excerpt from Ghosts: With an Enemy of the People and the Warriors at HelgelandThe Warriors at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland), the first of the three plays included in the present volume, was written in 1857, when Ibsen (who was then in his thirtieth year) was at Christiania. Both in conception and execution it is an enormous advance on the immature efforts which had preceded it, and, apart from its own very considerable merits, poetic and dramatic, it is noteworthy as foreshadowing two aspects of the later genius that could produce Peer Gynt and The Wild Duck. Judged as a poetic romance, it has great charm if approached in the necessary spirit of simplicity. As a piece of dramatic construction it is admirable, and already characteristic of the later Ibsen in its methods. A preface which Ibsen wrote in 1876 for a German translation of the play affords interesting evidence of his sane dramatic sense. After remarking that the Volsung Saga was the source of his inspiration for the play, he goes on to say that he was nevertheless convinced that 'the idealised and, to a certain extent, impersonal figures in the Sagas" were unsuitable for representation on the stage of to-day, and that, apart from this, it had been his aim in this play to present "not mythical personages, but Scandinavian life in olden times." To realise the wisdom of this, one has only to compare the human interest possessed by the characters in The Warriors at Helgeland with the almost entire lack of it in the heroes and heroines of Wagner's Ring der Nibelungen.Ibsen offered the play to the Royal Theatre at Copenhagen and to the Christiania Theatre, and both promptly rejected it as unsuitable to the tastes of the public. It was not until 1861, after a tentative performance at Bergen, that the play was produced at the Christiania Theatre. It was not seen in Copenhagen until some fourteen years later.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.