It is easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought thus of love contemplated the business of “love-making,” and the ceremonial discipline of Continental courtship. The whole unnumbered tribe of wooing and plighted lovers were for him unconscious actors in a world-comedy of Love’s contriving—naïve fools of fancy, passionately weaving the cords that are to strangle passion. Comedy like this cannot be altogether gay; and as each fresh romance decays into routine, and each aspiring passion goes out under the spell of a vulgar environment, or submits to the bitter salvation of a final parting, the ringing laughter grows harsh and hollow, and notes of ineffable sadness escape from the poet’s Stoic self-restraint.
Ibsen had grown up in a school which cultivated the romantic, piquant, picturesque in style; which ran riot in wit, in vivacious and brilliant imagery, in resonant rhythms and telling double rhymes. It must be owned that this was not the happiest school for a dramatist, nor can Love’s Comedy be regarded, in the matter of style, as other than a risky experiment which nothing but the sheer dramatic force of an Ibsen could have carried through. As it is, there are palpable fluctuations, discrepancies of manner; the realism of treatment often provokes a realism of style out of keeping with the lyric afflatus of the verse; and we pass with little warning from the barest colloquial prose to strains of high-wrought poetic fancy. Nevertheless, the style, with all its inequalities, becomes in Ibsen’s hands a singularly plastic medium of dramatic expression. The marble is too richly veined for ideal sculpture, but it takes the print of life. The wit, exuberant as it is, does not coruscate indiscriminately upon all lips; and it has many shades and varieties—caustic, ironical, imaginative, playful, passionate—which take their temper from the speaker’s mood.
The present version of the play retains the metres of the original, and follows it in general line for line. For a long passage, occupying substantially the first twenty pages, the translator is indebted to the editor of the present work; and two other passages—Falk’s tirades on pp. [58] and [100]—result from a fusion of versions made independently by us both.
C. H. H.
LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT
(1855)
CHARACTERS
- Lady Inger Ottisdaughter Römer, widow of High Steward Nils Gyldenlöve.
- Elina Gyldenlöve, her daughter.
- Nils Lykke, Danish knight and councillor.
- Olaf Skaktavl, an outlawed Norwegian noble.
- Nils Stensson.
- Jens Bielke, Swedish commander.
- Biörn, majordomo at Östråt.
- Finn, a servant.
- Einar Huk, bailiff at Östråt.
- Servants, peasants, and Swedish men-at-arms.
The action takes place at Östråt Manor, on the Trondhiem Fiord, in the year 1528.
[Pronunciation of Names.—Östråt = Östrot; Elina (Norwegian, Eline) = Eleena; Stensson = Staynson; Biörn = Byörn; Jens Bielke = Yens Byelke; Huk = Hook. The g's in “Inger” and in “Gyldenlöve” are, of course, hard. The final e's and the ö's pronounced much as in German.]