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    Hedda Gabler
    Hedda Gabler
    Hedda Gabler
    Ebook216 pages1 hour

    Hedda Gabler

    By Henrik Ibsen

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 drama “Hedda Gabler” is one of the Norwegian playwright’s best-known works and boasts one of the greatest female lead roles in the history of theatre. A new bride, Hedda is bored and disillusioned with her marriage. The reappearance of Eilert, her former lover and recovering alcoholic writer creates havoc in her own marriage to George, a sober academic. When Hedda and George come into possession of the only copy of Eilert’s explosive unpublished novel, jealousy and intrigue build up to a ferocious climax.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media
    Release dateSep 25, 2018
    ISBN9781974997633
    Author

    Henrik Ibsen

    Born in 1828, Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and poet, often associated with the early Modernist movement in theatre. Determined to become a playwright from a young age, Ibsen began writing while working as an apprentice pharmacist to help support his family. Though his early plays were largely unsuccessful, Ibsen was able to take employment at a theatre where he worked as a writer, director, and producer. Ibsen’s first success came with Brand and Peter Gynt, and with later plays like A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and The Master Builder he became one of the most performed playwrights in the world, second only to William Shakespeare. Ibsen died in his home in Norway in 1906 at the age of 78.

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    Reviews for Hedda Gabler

    3.5/5

    386 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I can see him. With vineleaves in his hair. Flushed and confident.

      I have intended on reading Ibsen my entire adult life. Thinking that perhaps my number may be up, I finally ventured and am glad I did. This play was surprisingly modern and kinetic. Not sure why, but I expected something dour, suffering in the shadows. Violence through understatement. A Scandinavian skewering of morals.

      Mismatched couples are such fun--from Middlemarch to The Honeymooners. I'd like to read responses to the character Hedda Gabler herself. There are multitudes in her pauses. This was the first play I read in 2016, surprising as I read 12 the year before.
    • 4/5
      I recommend it for the compactness of the story, the solid foreshadowing, and the ending. The play is about control, Hedda's mastery at controlling others and her despondency when her greatest attempt fails. The end came back to me often over next few days.
    • 3/5
      This is a short play that packs a punch! It also has an exciting ending. A Wikipedia quote says "Depending on the interpretation, Hedda may be portrayed as an idealistic heroine fighting society, a victim of circumstance, a prototypical feminist, or a manipulative villain." So you can decide!
    • 4/5
      Read this for a Lit class... Gosh, Hedda Gabler was not very nice.
    • 3/5
      Why, oh why, do I get the impression that Ibsen didn't like his female protagonists very much?

      Or, in other words, is there a specific reason that both Nora (from A Doll's House) and Hedda are written as two rather silly women, both incapable of a rational thought?

      Surely, exploring the theme of individuals trapped in situation which they want to escape from has more to offer than half-baked schemes, lies, deception, and artistic illusions?

      Ugh...
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure what Mr. Ibsen intended when he created the character of Hedda Gabler, but she is the perfect example of a person who is admired for her position, but is completely unworthy of that admiration. She is the hateful bully that gets away with it because no one wants to believe it of her. In the end, her death is an indication of how manipulation of others doesn't give you what you want - it just makes you hate yourself and your life. The tragedy is that Hedda wasn't satisfied until she had ruined the lives around her first.
    • 4/5
      Hedda is kind of a stuck-up, manipulative, hopelessly romantic to the point of nihilistic woman, with an unsubsidiable pride and exaggerated sense of aestheticism. This is an extremely difficult character to portray that when I read the script, I just love Hedda and in some way see myself in her but when seeing it onstage she was such a bitch I just needed to punch her on the face 8-}. Anyways, the character's ambiguity and openness to interpretation is precisely what to love I guess
    • 4/5
      This classic Ibsen play is about a woman who has ambitions beyond her modest life, and her beauty has captured a number of men who are willing to help her meet those ambitions. She has no scruples, and will do anything to get what she desires. It is a quick and easy read, and keeps you turning the pages until you reach the final, startling ending.
    • 3/5
      What a bitch and what a great role. I could see her character translated into a corporate-type taking on the glass ceiling -- ruthless and manipulative. A timeless character.
    • 4/5
      Even though I'm a fan of master composer Ibsen, this one I've strangely neither seen staged, nor read before. I'm really glad I did now! It's an unusual play, both in plot (revolving mostly around trying to stage your mundane life to try and evoke some excitement) and in it's protagonist. Hedda is not very likeable - she's nasty, condecending, full of herself and not as clever as she would like to think, but in all that she makes up for a memorable and rare character. As are all of them, by the way. This play provides a great cast of slighlty heightened but very relateable people, whose lives fall into pieces through Ibsen's usual revelation of their life lies. But it's subtly done here, understated and hinted, making the play sneaky and more surprising than Ibsen's plays normally are. Even the inevitable female suicide in the end is more an act of taking matter in one's own hands than one of desperation. All in all, surely one of Ibsen's finer plays. Can't wait to see it on stage.
    • 5/5
      I'd never read any Ibsen before and was astonished by this - its psychological depth compared to its economy was amazing, even for drama. Hedda Gabler, the ferociously intelligent, dangerously cruel, yet ultimately pitiable protagonist defies easy categorisation.

      I can't imagine why I've waited till now to read it - I saw that there was a new production of it on in London and thought, ooh, I should give that a go. It was another of those "to read" books that's been on the pile for years.

      It's a pile I really need to mine more often at this rate.
    • 4/5
      I can't decide whether to hate Hedda or feel pity for her… She is one of the most conniving women I have ever read about, yet she doesn't seem to get any enjoyment out of it. I would love to see this on the stage.

    Book preview

    Hedda Gabler - Henrik Ibsen

    cover.jpg

    HEDDA GABLER

    By

    HENRIK IBSEN

    Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer

    This edition published by Dreamscape Media LLC, 2018

    www.dreamscapeab.com * info@dreamscapeab.com

    1417 Timberwolf Drive, Holland, OH 43528

    877.983.7326

    dreamscape

    About Henrik Ibsen:

    Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. As one of the founders of Modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as the father of realism and one of the most influential playwrights of his time. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Pillars of Society, The Lady from the Sea, Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, and John Gabriel Borkman. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and by the early 20th century A Doll's House became the world's most performed play.

    Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.

    Ibsen is often ranked as one of the most distinguished playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as a profound poetic dramatist—the best since Shakespeare. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904.

    Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway during his lifetime) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and (Germany), and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, Ibsen shaped his dramas according to his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. Ibsen's dramas continue in their influence upon contemporary culture and film.

    Source: Wikipedia

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION.

    CHARACTERS.

    ACT FIRST.

    ACT SECOND.

    ACT THIRD.

    ACT FOURTH.

    INTRODUCTION

    by William Archer

    From Munich, on June 29, 1890, Ibsen wrote to the Swedish poet, Count Carl Soilsky: Our intention has all along been to spend the summer in the Tyrol again. But circumstances are against our doing so. I am at present engaged upon a new dramatic work, which for several reasons has made very slow progress, and I do not leave Munich until I can take with me the completed first draft. There is little or no prospect of my being able to complete it in July. Ibsen did not leave Munich at all that season. On October 30 he wrote: At present I am utterly engrossed in a new play. Not one leisure hour have I had for several months. Three weeks later (November 20) he wrote to his French translator, Count Prozor: My new play is finished; the manuscript went off to Copenhagen the day before yesterday.... It produces a curious feeling of emptiness to be thus suddenly separated from a work which has occupied one's time and thoughts for several months, to the exclusion of all else. But it is a good thing, too, to have done with it. The constant intercourse with the fictitious personages was beginning to make me quite nervous. To the same correspondent he wrote on December 4: "The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda, as a personality, is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than as her husband's wife. It was not my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day."

    So far we read the history of the play in the official Correspondence.(A) Some interesting glimpses into the poet's moods during the period between the completion of The Lady from the Sea and the publication of Hedda Gabler are to be found in the series of letters to Fraulein Emilie Bardach, of Vienna, published by Dr. George Brandes.(B) This young lady Ibsen met at Gossensass in the Tyrol in the autumn of 1889. The record of their brief friendship belongs to the history of The Master Builder rather than to that of Hedda Gabler, but the allusions to his work in his letters to her during the winter of 1889 demand some examination.

    So early as October 7, 1889, he writes to her: A new poem begins to dawn in me. I will execute it this winter, and try to transfer to it the bright atmosphere of the summer. But I feel that it will end in sadness—such is my nature. Was this dawning poem Hedda Gabler? Or was it rather The Master Builder that was germinating in his mind? Who shall say? The latter hypothesis seems the more probable, for it is hard to believe that at any stage in the incubation of Hedda Gabler he can have conceived it as even beginning in gaiety. A week later, however, he appears to have made up his mind that the time had not come for the poetic utilisation of his recent experiences. He writes on October 15: Here I sit as usual at my writing-table. Now I would fain work, but am unable to. My fancy, indeed, is very active. But it always wanders away ours. I cannot repress my summer memories—nor do I wish to. I live through my experience again and again and yet again. To transmute it all into a poem, I find, in the meantime, impossible. Clearly, then, he felt that his imagination ought to have been engaged on some theme having no relation to his summer experiences—the theme, no doubt, of Hedda Gabler. In his next letter, dated October 29, he writes: "Do not be troubled because I cannot, in the meantime, create (dichten). In reality I am for ever creating, or, at any rate, dreaming of something which, when in the fulness of time it ripens, will reveal itself as a creation (Dichtung). On November 19 he says: I am very busily occupied with preparations for my new poem. I sit almost the whole day at my writing-table. Go out only in the evening for a little while. The five following letters contain no allusion to the play; but on September 18, 1890, he wrote: My wife and son are at present at Riva, on the Lake of Garda, and will probably remain there until the middle of October, or even longer. Thus I am quite alone here, and cannot get away. The new play on which I am at present engaged will probably not be ready until November, though I sit at my writing-table daily, and almost the whole day long."

    Here ends the history of Hedda Gabler, so far as the poet's letters carry us. Its hard clear outlines, and perhaps somewhat bleak atmosphere, seem to have resulted from a sort of reaction against the sentimental dreamery begotten of his Gossensass experiences. He sought refuge in the chill materialism of Hedda from the ardent transcendentalism of Hilda, whom he already heard knocking at the door. He was not yet in the mood to deal with her on the plane of poetry.(C)

    Hedda Gabler was published in Copenhagen on December 16, 1890. This was the first of Ibsen's plays to be translated from proof-sheets and published in England and America almost simultaneously with its first appearance in Scandinavia. The earliest theatrical performance took place at the Residenz Theater, Munich, on the last day of January 1891, in the presence of the poet, Frau Conrad-Ramlo playing the title-part. The Lessing Theater, Berlin, followed suit on February 10. Not till February 25 was the play seen in Copenhagen, with Fru Hennings as Hedda. On the following night it was given for the first time in Christiania, the Norwegian Hedda being Froken Constance Bruun. It was this production which the poet saw when he visited the Christiania Theater for the first time after his return to Norway, August 28, 1891. It would take pages to give even the baldest list of the productions and revivals of Hedda Gabler in Scandinavia and Germany, where it has always ranked among Ibsen's most popular works. The admirable production of the play by Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Marion Lea, at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, April 20, 1891, may rank as the second great step towards the popularisation of Ibsen in England, the first being the Charrington-Achurch production of A Doll's House in 1889. Miss Robins afterwards repeated her fine performance of Hedda many times, in London, in the English provinces, and in New York. The character has also been acted in London by Eleonora Duse, and as I write (March,

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