A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts

Henrik Ibsen Brand A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts Translated by John Northam I b s e n . n e t 2 0 0 7 Contents PREFACE................................................................................................................3 CHARACTERS .......................................................................................................5 ACT 1.......................................................................................................................6 ACT 2.....................................................................................................................22 ACT 3.....................................................................................................................42 ACT 4.....................................................................................................................64 ACT 5.....................................................................................................................92 NOTES.................................................................................................................133 PREFACE The imposing figure of Brand looms large in Ibsen’s development as a dramatist. The dramatic poem that bears his name links Ibsen’s earlier output with his later emergence as the writer of modern tragedies. Ibsen’s earlier career to date had been more or less equally divided between his poems (see The Collected Poems on this website) and his plays. The poetry shows a restless preoccupation with stanzaic forms: lyrics, odes, sonnets, together with long epic and other narrative pieces. Much of the poetry is conventional in style and sentiment, but there are some indications almost from the beginning of a desire on Ibsen’s part to bring it to bear on contemporary life. The direct precursors of Brand, the epics and quasi-epics, serve to illustrate the point. Ibsen’s first essay in the epic mode was the naive Helge Hundingbane, a simple endorsement of ancient saga heroics. Terje Vigen was a tale of a simple peasant caught up in the chaos of recent wars, On the Heights, a quasi-epic that explored the spiritual predicament of a young idealist in a prosaic world. These works, though they relate to modern reality and start to define its problems, do not penetrate deeply into the inner life of the protagonists. Ibsen’s early plays, too, also reflect his preoccupation with form. Some are written in prose, some in prose interspersed, for no obvious dramatic purpose, with rhyme, some combine rhymed with blank verse. At times the rhymed passages assume, almost involuntarily, stanzaic form. But the plays show less inclination than do the poems to confront modern life. All of them, with one exception, are set in a distant past which lends them a ready-made glamour and nobility but inhibits any relevance to the Norway that Ibsen knew. The one exception, Love’s Comedy, a verse play that offers just such a confrontation arising out of the choice of a husband, is a light-weight piece that invites comparison with a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Ibsen’s own assessment of it is suggested by the assurance, given to a friend while he was working on Brand, that it would not be “another Love’s Comedy.” The first of Ibsen’s attempts to depict Brand, in the so-called epic, differs from this earlier work by asserting, unambiguously, its directness of reference to modern Norwegian society. Its clear intention is to trace the career of a missionary spirit, conceived not as a nobleman but as a priest whose heroic stature lies in his inner spiritual strength, progressively revealed through a series of encounters with his fellow countrymen, without recourse to archaic models. Such is the intention, but the candid reader is likely to feel that Ibsen’s adherence to a fixed narrative form defeated his object. Everything is narrated or described. The unvaried verse form inhibits characterisation through dialogue and slows down the action. After 212 eight-line stanzas the epic has got nowhere. There have been many conjectures as to why Ibsen suddenly abandoned the epic, but a reason may be deduced from an episode very near its end in which Brand watches the Mayor doling out famine relief to the starving peasantry. The scene captures in dramatic terms the social degradation that Brand must confront; the figure of the callously complacent official is the most vividly realised character in the whole epic. Ibsen had suddenly found a new, dramatic way of telling his tale. BRAND. (Preface) Brand, the dramatic poem, begins where the epic broke off, with an immediate confrontation with a peasant and his son. Everything thereafter is conceived in dramatic terms. The non-stanzaic verse rhymes but is more flexible, allowing each of a wide range of characters to speak in their own tone of voice. Metres, too, are deployed for dramatic purposes: iambics largely for discourse, trochaics to suggest moments of intense introspection or debate. The settings in which the encounters take place are no longer described at length but become, in an imagined performance, visual images that help to define the emotional, moral and spiritual pressures under which the various characters labour. Even the biblical references, which are remarkably numerous, are made to serve a dramatic purpose. Brand’s quotations are invariable precise and apposite; the Dean uses them as mere stock-in-trade, the Mayor allows himself a flippant reference to God’s approval of His creation by judging his own paltry church festival to be, in God’s own words “very good”, and has the gall to liken his unfeeling charity work to Jesus’s feeding of the multitude in the desert. Biblical references and visual settings combine, dramatically, in the final catastrophe to focus on the complex judgement that Brand’s missionary endeavours invite. The vastness of the avalanche lends stature to Brand’s destruction but also to the moment of his melting into humanity. The intervention, from God himself it seems, asserting that “He is the God of love”, together with the imagery that describes the avalanche as white as a dove, refers us back to the dove that God sent down to Jesus after His baptism by St John. The difference between the two occasions makes us focus on the ambiguity of Brand’s death. God’s blessing upon Jesus was unequivocal, while the affirmation “He is the God of love” may seem a rebuke to a man who, throughout his missionary career, has subordinated love to rigour. But the words may also suggest that God’s love might still be extended to a man who, though humanly flawed, had laboured heroically in a noble cause. Ibsen did not portray Brand as either a flawless missionary or a destructive bigot; he is in a sense both. He is the first embodiment of Ibsen’s emergent understanding of the tragic complexities inherent in contemporary life, in which it is not fate or the gods that influence human destinies but the insidious power of social pressures, environment, upbringing and heredity that initially distorts the individual’s sense of personal identity. Brand’s subordination of love is due to the loveless home into which he was born. The protagonists of the modern plays are characters who are likewise brought slowly to face their own induced inauthenticity and, in a flash of Aristotelian recognition, to respond to the promptings of their essential selves. Their endings, whether in death or by the sacrifice of everything they had hitherto valued, celebrate the reassertion of integrity despite a degraded and degrading world. The scale of the modern plays is obviously more restricted than that of Brand, the circumstances, like their language, more prosaic, yet the vision they embody and the dramatic intensity they deploy in its expression owe much to the dramatic poem. Indeed Brand might be thought of as the first of Ibsen’s modern tragedies. 4 CHARACTERS Brand. His Mother. Einar, a Painter. Agnes. The Mayor. The Doctor. The Dean. The Sexton. The Schoolmaster. Gerd. A Peasant. His half-grown Son. Another Peasant. A Woman. Another Woman. A Clerk. Priests and Officials. The Crowd, Men, Women and Children. The Tempter in the Wasteland. The Invisible Choir. A Voice. (The action takes place in our time, partly in partly around a village by the fjord on the West Coast of Norway.) ACT 1 (In snow on the high plateau. Mist, thick and heavy; wet and murky weather) BRAND (dressed in black, with staff and pack, clambers his way westwards) A PEASANT and his half-grown SON (who have been accompanying him, a little way behind) Peasant (shouts after Brand) Hi, mister, not so fast I say! Where are you? Brand Here. Peasant You're off the way! The mist's so thick you'll hardly see your staff's end for the way it's packing — Son There's splits here, Dad! Peasant And here it’s cracking! Brand We’ve lost the trail now, utterly. Peasant (yells) Stop, man! Good grief — ! The snow there's barely stronger than piecrust! You tread wary! Brand (listens) I hear the boom of waterfall. Peasant A beck's been scooping out down under; 10 too deep to plumb, I shouldn't wonder; — could swallow you down, us and all! Brand I must go on, I said before. Peasant Too much for mortal strength, that's sure. Look; — ground here's hollow, rotten too — Stop man! It's life and death for you! Brand Must — in a great one's cause I’m shod. Peasant And who is that? Brand His name is God.. Peasant And what might you be then? Brand A priest. Peasant Maybe; but this I know at least, 20 be you a bishop or a dean, you'll lie at death's last gasp between now and next daybreak, man, if you will go where ice is eaten through. (approaches warily and persuasively) Look, priest, you may be learned, wise, but who’d risk such an enterprise? Turn back; don't be so set on strife! We've only got the one bare life; lose that, and then what’s left, I say? The nearest farm's seven mile away,* 30 and with the mist so thick, I lay you could well cut it with a knife. Brand Well, if it’s thick, we shan’t be led by jack-o’-lanterns on ahead.

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