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Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

Series Editors Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel Massachusetts Maritime Academy Pocasset, MA, USA

Peter Gahan Independent Scholar Los Angeles, CA, USA The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading writer in Britain and , and with a wide European and American following. Shaw defned the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, ­lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as pointed the way towards . No one with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as ­controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14785 Joan Templeton Shaw’s Ibsen

A Re-Appraisal Joan Templeton New York, NY, USA

Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries ISBN 978-1-137-54341-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54044-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. For , The Mentor of Us All Preface

The is perhaps the most famous book ever ­written by one author about another. Published in 1891 and revised and enlarged in 1913, it has been reprinted over and over and is regarded as a classic. But the book’s value is usually considered to lie less in what it reveals about its subject——than about its author—Bernard Shaw. For many readers, this is not much of a detriment. Shaw’s latest British biographer, , fnds that the joy of reading the Quintessence “is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him.” Although Shaw’s conversion of Ibsen “into a wholesale warrior does involve distortions to some of the plays,” Holroyd notes, Shaw’s purpose, after all, was to present his own “credentials as a man who was carrying on Ibsen’s busi- ness of ‘changing the mind of Europe’” (H 1:199). The Quintessence is ­considered to be the most important of Shaw’s nondramatic works for explaining his view of the world and a “blueprint,” in Christopher Innes’s term, for understanding his plays.1 In a recent statement on the book’s usefulness, Matthew Yde notes that the Quintessence “has usually been understood as a good indicator of Shaw’s own thinking, rather than a reli- able guide to understanding Ibsen’s dramaturgical strategy and philoso- phy of life; the quintessence of Shavianism rather than the quintessence of Ibsenism.”2 Eric Bentley was blunter; although he appreciated Shaw’s understanding of Ibsen, nevertheless, in his classic Bernard Shaw (1947), he directed readers of the Quintessence to substitute the word “Shaw” for the word “Ibsen” throughout.3 Blunter still was Charles Carpenter,

vii viii Preface over twenty years later, who noted: “Despite its subject (and its value as an analysis of Ibsen), the book is still an uncamoufaged piece of Shavian propaganda.”4 A considerably more critical view of Quintessence is that whatever it tells us about Shaw, it is a seriously misleading book about Ibsen. Shortly after Shaw read a frst version—a lecture to the —in 1890, he was accused of transforming Ibsen into a socialist like himself. This false charge, which still lingers, is the crudest version of the popu- lar notion that Shaw wrongly regarded Ibsen as a reformer rather than an artist. A month after the Quintessence appeared, Shaw’s great friend , Ibsen’s devoted champion in , published what was essentially a review of the book, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism: An Open Letter to .” In it, he noted that Shaw’s argu- ment would “strengthen the predisposition . . . to regard Ibsen, not as a poet, but as the showman of a moral wax-work.” He noted, how- ever, that this “cannot be helped” because “it is a drawback inseparable from expository criticism” (A 31). By 1905, fourteen years later, Ibsen, now established as a great dramatist, had been the subject of a number of books in several languages that heralded his plays as arguments for women’s rights and other causes. Greatly irritated, Archer took it upon himself to respond in a lengthy , “Henrik Ibsen: Philosopher or Poet?,” in which he vehemently denounced the irksome critics who read Ibsen as “primarily a thinker, and only in the second place a poet”; he briefy named “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little study, The Quintessence of Ibsenism” as “the type of this method of criticism” (A 81). Other ­critics, who found the Quintessence less than “brilliant,” blamed Shaw outright for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of social protest. In the same year as Archer’s essay, 1905, the American critic pub- lished his landmark survey of early modern , Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists, in which he claimed that in the Quintessence, Shaw had transformed Ibsen into “a magnifed image” of himself, “dropping ideas from on high with Olympian indifference,” with the result that “we are never shown Ibsen the artist, but always the social reformer with an awful frown.”5 As Shaw became famous as a dramatist in the frst decade of the ­twentieth century, his plays infuenced his reputation as a critic, and he was accused of being a didactic writer incapable of understanding the art- ist Ibsen, and even, in one well-known instance, of having been Ibsen’s “butcher.”6 By the 1930s, could remark in passing in a Preface ix letter to a friend that Shaw “had slandered Ibsen in a way that must make poor old I[bsen] turn in his grave” (W 3), and Edmund Wilson, in The Triple Thinkers (1938), declared that Shaw, in turning Ibsen into a social reformer, creates “a false impression” and “seriously misrepresents him.”7 In the 1940s and 1950s, Shaw became a whipping boy of the New Critics as a foremost example of the unpoetic soul. The movement’s most famous arbiter of taste, T. S. Eliot, famously and somewhat nastily attacked Shaw in his imaginary conversation, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” in which “B,” one of the participants, explains that “Shaw was a poet—until he was born, and the poet in Shaw was stillborn. Shaw has a great deal of poetry but all stillborn; Shaw is dramatically pre- cocious and poetically less than immature.”8 Following Eliot, Raymond Williams took on the task of saving Ibsen from the offcially unpoetic Shaw in his infuential Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1953). Explaining that his book is intended to be literary criticism in the manner of “Mr. Eliot,” Williams offers a “revaluation of Ibsen.”9 He seems almost to be holding his nose as he regrets that Ibsen’s mode was realism, “a tradition which was acutely inimical to art”; in spite of this impediment, however, Ibsen somehow managed to achieve “work as valid and as permanent as our century has” (97). But because of the pernicious infuence of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which “has to do with Ibsen only in the sense that it seriously misrepresents him” (138), Ibsen has been mistaken for sixty years as a writer who focused on moral issues that were incidental to his art. For having committed this blunder, Williams believes, Shaw and the other “Ibsenites” deserve to be blamed as “the disintegrators of Ibsen” (43). Williams is especially indignant at what he claims is the Ibsenites’ dismissal of Ibsen’s last four plays, and he cites as proof the subtitle of Shaw’s essay on them in the Quintessence: “‘Down among the Dead Men,’ said Shaw, and Down, Down, Down was the estimate of the last plays as they appeared” (86). But while some of the Ibsenites were puzzled by the late plays, others praised them, most especially Shaw him- self, whose “Down Among the Dead Men” is among the most laudatory of all his writings on Ibsen. Here, Shaw writes, Ibsen passes “into the shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more powerful” (Q2 136). Clearly, Williams did not bother to read past the subtitle of the essay he was denigrating. Seven years later, in 1960, James Walter McFarlane, editor of The Oxford Ibsen, the standard scholarly edition of Ibsen’s works in English, x Preface reiterated Williams’s general gripe against Shaw as a reader of Ibsen, although in a politer tone. McFarlane scolded Shaw for having claimed that Ibsen’s plays are “frst and foremost the embodiment of a lesson, illustrations of a thesis, exercises in moral persuasion.” To “ask for the quintessence of Ibsenism” is specious because it is “to formulate a wholly misleading question; there is nothing to be got by boiling down, there is no extract of wisdom that would allow us to regard [Ibsen’s] drama as a linctus for the ills of mankind.”10 Three years after this, the American drama scholar , in his survey of modern drama, The Flower and the Castle (1963), blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s “reputation as primarily a social dramatist” and claimed that “a brilliant rhetorician and a wit” like Shaw could not understand Ibsen, “an artist.”11 Another well-known American writer on the modern theater, , in The Theatre of Revolt (1964), takes the same viewpoint: “The Ibsen who tried so hard to disassociate himself from any consistent position would not have recognized himself in the ‘social pioneer’ of The Quintessence, whose ‘gospel’ is designed to save the human race.”12 Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen, appearing from 1967 to 1971, consolidated the anti-Shaw tradition. Castigating Shaw several times over, Meyer dismissed the Quintessence as “one of the most misleading books about a great writer that can ever have been written. Had it been entitled Ibsen Considered as a Socialist, or The Quintessence of Shavianism, one would have no quarrel with it” (M 636). Like Archer, Huneker, McFarlane, Williams, Wilson, and Valency, Meyer blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of thesis plays, complaining that Shaw was responsible for the notion that A Doll’s House was “a about the hoary problem of women’s rights” (M 457). In 1972, Michael Egan, editor of Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, followed Meyer, noting that in the Quintessence, “the defnition of Ibsenism implicitly offered (a literary campaign for moral reform through the exposure of middle-class hypoc- risy) was the quintessence of Shavianism. It tells us more about Shaw and the way he used and misunderstood Ibsen than it tells us about the com- plexities of, say, or Little Eyolf.”13 By 1975, the notion of Shaw’s distortion of Ibsen was so widely accepted that Daniel Dervin could write: “As we know [my italics], after a certain point when Shaw scrutinized Ibsen, he began to see what Narcissus saw in the pool.”14 For Dervin, Shaw’s own plays are enough to condemn him as a bad reader of Ibsen: the famous confrontation Preface xi scene between wife and husband in the third act of A Doll’s House “is not intended to provoke thought and reform by educating the audience to social realities as Shaw’s plays increasingly attempt to do” (185). Ten years later, in 1985, in Ibsen and Shaw, Keith May claimed that Shaw was wrong about Ibsen because his own optimism prevented him from understanding that Ibsen, who believed in “timeless human weakness,” was a skeptic: “All that mattered fundamentally to Ibsen was the noble spirit which fickered here and there in every generation.”15 The notion that Shaw’s “Ibsenism” is merely “Shavianism” in disguise is curiously ahistorical. In 1891, when he wrote the Quintessence, Shaw had not yet found his way as a writer. He had been an art critic and a music critic and had written fve unknown novels. If this work were all he produced in his lifetime, he would deserve some notice in the history of English criticism for his brilliant writing on music, but what we know as “Shavianism” would not exist. The Shaw of 1891, even with all his bril- liance, could hardly set out to make Ibsen’s works contain the quintes- sence of a way of thinking embodied in an oeuvre as yet unwritten. A second troubling aspect of the argument against Shaw is the notion that because he reads Ibsen as an anti-idealist like himself, he is ipso facto wrong. Apart from the odd implication that all writers possess a sensibil- ity that is wholly sui generis—which denies the notion of infuence, let alone movements, like Realism, or —the assumption is that Ibsen did not share Shaw’s anti-idealism. No critic has felt it necessary to offer any biographical or textual support for this position, which is presented as self-evident, but the critical logic is clear: Moral and social questions are not concerns of art; Ibsen’s work is art; therefore, Ibsen’s work is not concerned with moral and social issues. My aim in this book is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that the Quintessence is not about its subject, but its author, and that Shaw misunderstood Ibsen and misread his works. The notion that Shaw attempted to turn Ibsen into a socialist is surely one of the most egre- gious errors in the literary criticism of the twentieth century, and I have tried to establish the record of inattention, fawed scholarship, and bias that resulted in this widespread misconception. I have also tested Shaw’s claim that Ibsen was an anti-idealist against Ibsen’s own idea of himself as a writer, expressed over many years in speeches and in letters, the most important of which were written to his friend and fellow fghter for mod- ernism, the great Danish critic . I aim to show that writers who are determined to save Ibsen the poet from the taint of social and xii Preface cultural history ignore Ibsen’s own interests and concerns, as well as his strong conviction that his work was a “calling” through which he could speak truth to lies. But, as Inga-Stina Ewbank has written of Ibsen in another context, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,”16 i.e., in the text itself, and my main subject is Shaw’s analyses of Ibsen’s plays. The Quintessence is the frst book on Ibsen in English, and of all the early books on Ibsen, both inside and outside of Norway, it is the most ambitious, examining Ibsen’s both as an oeuvre—a collected body of works—and as individual plays. I consider Shaw’s readings both in the context of what his contemporaries wrote about Ibsen, in England and elsewhere, and on their own terms. Shaw as an actual reader of Ibsen has been buried under the idea of a Shaw who saw Ibsen as a social critic and a lecturer on mor- als. I present the “other Shaw” of the Quintessence, the Shaw who had so thoroughly absorbed Ibsen’s plays that they were as much a part of his mental and spiritual universe as were the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Bunyan, and the King James Bible. Shaw’s great quarrel with the nine- teenth-century theater—in his journalism, in the Quintessence, and in his columns as drama critic for the Saturday Review—was that it was irrel- evant to actual life. For Shaw, one of the chief glories of Ibsen’s “new drama” was its scrupulously detailed characters: living, breathing people who were the opposite of the stock characters of the contemporary stage. Shaw was one of the frst writers on Ibsen to offer detailed analyses of his characters, including astute psychological studies of Nora Helmer of A Doll’s House, Mrs. Alving of , and John Rosmer of Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, Halvard Solness of , and Rita and Alfred Allmers of Little Eyolf. I want to show that Shaw read Ibsen’s plays not from the outside in, but vice versa, and read him per- ceptively and often brilliantly. The number of Shaw’s observations and analyses about Ibsen’s plays that have become standard, though unac- knowledged, in the literature on Ibsen, is an interesting phenomenon. Equally interesting is that many of Shaw’s harshest critics echo his analy- ses in their own readings of Ibsen’s plays. Another goal, both historical and biographical, has been to trace Shaw’s personal response to Ibsen from his lukewarm initial opinion to his epiphanic reading of , with William Archer, to his awaken- ing, through A Doll’s House, to a new, modern drama that he himself would help to create. I have tried to shed light on Shaw’s and Archer’s deep friendship, their shared love of Ibsen, and their agreements and Preface xiii disagreements regarding both his work and the “new drama” in general. I have also tried to establish a record of Shaw’s participation in the Ibsen campaign in . While Michael Holroyd repeats the popular notion that when Shaw joined the campaign, he assumed its “generalship” (H 200), Michael Egan, editor of a 500-page anthology of pieces from Ibsen’s early English reception, claims that Shaw was “far less important than Archer, [Edmund] Gosse, or even Philip Wicksteed” [an economist who was one of the frst English writers on Ibsen]” (Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, 21). Using Shaw’s diaries and letters, as well as the letters of his friends and fellow “Ibsenites,” along with other records, I have tried to clarify Shaw’s important role in the campaign, not as its “general”— Archer has the right to that title—but as a journalist and drama critic who used his columns as a bully pulpit for Ibsen, and as a man of the theatre who tirelessly gave his support—and his criticisms—to the val- iant men and women who introduced Ibsen to the English stage, the most important of whom were producer J. T. Grein of the Independent Theatre, actor-managers Charles Charrington, , and , and actress Janet Achurch. The discussion of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen has been dominated by the Quintessence. But Shaw is the author of other signifcant work on Ibsen that merits attention, including his exuberant reporting on early Doll’s House performances and his vehement defense of the play against its English abusers. Among his most interesting and lively commentar- ies on Ibsen’s plays are those in his Saturday Review columns, collected in Our Theatres in the Nineties, a neglected body of work that is among the best dramatic criticism in English (and hands down the wittiest). It is hugely entertaining to follow Shaw through three and a half years of a personal campaign in which Ibsen serves as a battering ram to attack the “claptrap” and the “twaddle” of the London theatre, including the stagey spectacles of Shaw’s favorite target . Among Shaw’s columns are also reviews of eight productions of Ibsen’s plays that are historical and critical gems, among which are his delightful account of the landmark 1896 French premiere of Peer Gynt, directed by Lugné- Poë, his skewering of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the Independent Theatre’s calamitous 1896 production of Little Eyolf, and, in a column of 1897, his brilliant juxtaposition of the Independent Theatre’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. While it has been widely recognized that the dramaturgy, i.e., the play-making, of Shaw and Ibsen is very different, it is the custom to xiv Preface consider Shaw’s frst dramas, written in the 1890s, during the Ibsen cam- paign, as his “Ibsenite” plays. It has been fascinating to try to identify infuence and affnity—or lack of them—in the themes and the drama- turgy of Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and —the Shaw play most associated with Ibsen—and to elucidate a drama long deemed a puzzle, the “topical comedy” , Shaw’s only direct dramatization of “Ibsenism.” Throughout my study, I have tried to engage Shaw critically. Famous for taking up the roles of devil’s advocate and agent provocateur, Shaw habitually used his analytical genius in the service of polemics, and he does not hesitate to exaggerate to bolster his positions. This is especially marked in his arguments against Shakespeare worship, or “,” as he called it, in which he habitually holds Ibsen up as a writer superior to Shakespeare. It has been a very interesting task to examine these argu- ments, warts and all. Finally, a note on method: In 1913, in the second edition of the Quintessence, Shaw’s additions and revisions were incorporated into the original book of 1891, as though they had been there all along, and it is this combined version that constitutes the text as we know it. But the Shaw of 1913 was no longer the Shaw of 1891. I have studied the two texts separately in order to establish the critical record, and, more impor- tantly, to show how Shaw’s revisions and additions, including three new chapters, reveal his deepened vision both of Ibsen’s dramas and Ibsen’s revolutionary transformation of the theater.

New York, USA Joan Templeton

Notes 1. “‘Nothing but talk, talk, talk—Shaw talk’: Discussion Plays and the Making of Modern Drama,” The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163. 2. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 26. 3. Bernard Shaw (1947; New York: Applause Books, 2002), 139. 4. Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 9. 5. (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 243. 6. Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in Drama and Art (London: Frank Palmer, 1912), 36–37. Preface xv

7. (New York: Farrar-Straus, 1977), 185. 8. Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 38. 9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 95. 10. “Ibsen and Ibsenism,” from Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), reprinted in James McFarlane, Ibsen and Meaning: Studies, Essays, and Prefaces 1953–1987 (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1989), 61. 11. (New York: Schocken, 1963), 386. 12. (: Little, Brown, 1964), 187. 13. (London: Routledge, 1972), 21. 14. Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1975), 184. 15. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 120, 123. May’s book of ninety- eight pages on Ibsen and a hundred and eight pages on Shaw is not the comparative study its title suggests. May repeats the conventional contrast between Ibsen the poet and Shaw the moralist, but after arguing that Shaw misunderstood Ibsen, he offers a “reminder” that “Shaw’s analy- sis of Ibsen’s plays was far ahead of his contemporaries, including the shrewdly appreciative William Archer” (124). 16. “Ibsen on the English Stage: ‘The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating,’” Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production, ed. Errol Durbach (London: New York University Press, 1980), 27–48. Acknowledgements

The greatest joy of fnishing a book lies in thanking those who have con- tributed to it, and it is with immense pleasure that I express my gratitude to fve Shaw scholars and friends who have made this book far better than it would otherwise be. Richard F. Dietrich urged me long ago to take up the subject of Shaw and Ibsen, and when I fnally had time to do it, he gave me great help along the way. Thank you, Dick, for encour- aging me to plunge into the fascinating waters of the world of GBS; it has been a splendid swim. I also express my deep gratitude to Martin Meisel, who was kind enough to offer to read my manuscript and who did so painstakingly, offering helpful emendations and suggestions, and, most of all, saving me from errors. A thousand thanks to you, Martin. To Michel Pharand goes my heartfelt appreciation for two different kinds of services: his fne copy-editing skills and his support and encouragement during a trying time. Merci infniment. I am also very happy to thank Ellen Dolgin for many conversations about Shaw and his plays that were immensely helpful to me in clarifying my ideas (and a lot of fun, besides). Finally, I express my gratitude to my editor, Peter Gahan, for his enthu- siasm, his corrections, his excellent suggestions about organization, and his help with the cover. I would also like to thank my Palgrave Editor, Tomas René, and Palgrave Assistant Editor Vicky Bates, for their enthusiastic support and help. It was a pleasure to work with them. My thanks go also to Michael O’Hara, President of the International Shaw Society, and his organizing committee for the 2015 Shaw

xvii xviii Acknowledgements conference at Fordham University, Manhattan, and to Frode Helland, Director of the Ibsen Center, University of Oslo, for inviting me to speak on occasions at which I could test my argument of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen before knowledgeable audiences. The responses I received from both groups were immensely important to me. Once again, I have the pleasure of acknowledging the singular impor- tance of my “home away from home,” the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where I did much of the work on this book in the quiet confnes of the Wertheim Room; I thank Jay Barksdale, librarian extraordinaire, for his help. I would also like to thank the librar- ians of the National Library, Oslo, and the , London. For help with photographs, I am grateful to Patricia Perez of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Susannah Mayor of Smallhythe Place, the Museum; the curators of the Fales Library archives, New York University; and the rights and images departments of the Senate House Library, , the of Great Britain, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. I would like to signal my great debt to four exemplary collections that were essential to my work: Dan R. Laurence’s Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, ’s Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, Evert Sprinchorn’s Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, and Jonathan Wisenthal’s Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings. I gratefully acknowledge the Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from his works. Lastly, I would like to thank all the members of the International Shaw Society who welcomed a newcomer and made her feel at home. Contents

The Road to the Quintessence 1 1 Becoming an Ibsen Critic: Shaw, Archer, and the New Drama 1 2 The Fabian Society Lecture: Shaw, Ibsen, and 38

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891 53 1 The Framing Chapters: Ibsen’s Modernism 57 2 Ibsen’s Revolutionary Calling 72 3 Reading Ibsen’s Texts: “The Plays” 85 4 The Open Mind of Ibsenism: “The Moral of the Plays” 131 5 Ibsen and the English Theatre: “The Appendix” 136

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898 151 1 The Dramatist: Widowers’ Houses to Candida 151 2 The Dramatic Critic: Our Theatres in the Nineties 184

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen, 1913 253 1 Shaw’s Obituary of Ibsen 253 2 An Old and a New Ibsen 261 3 “The Last Four Plays: Down Among the Dead Men” 271

xix xx Contents

4 A Modernist Manifesto: “What is the New Element in the Norwegian School?” 291 5 The Playwright as Thinker: “The Technical Novelty in Ibsen’s Plays” 299 6 Then and Now: 1891 and 1913 308 7 Postscript: “Needed: An Ibsen Theatre” 309 8 The Last Envoy: “Preface to the Third Edition,” 1922 311

Works Cited 321

Index 329 Abbreviations

A William Archer on Ibsen. The Major Essays, 1889–1919. Ed. Thomas Postlewait. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984. CA Charles Archer. William Archer. Life—Work—and Friendships. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931. CL Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874–1897; 1898–1910. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985, 1988. D Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885–1897. 2 vols. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. H Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw. 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1988, 1989, 1991. I Henrik Ibsen. Samlede Verker [Collected Works]. 3 vols. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1978. LS Ibsen. Letters and Speeches. Ed. and trans. Evert Sprinchorn. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. M Michael Meyer. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971. OTN Bernard Shaw. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London: Constable, 1932. P Margot Peters. Bernard Shaw and the Actresses. Garden City: Doubleday, 1980. P Bernard Shaw: Prefaces. London: Constable, 1934. Q G. Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott, 1891. Q2 Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen. New York: Brentano’s, 1913. W Shaw and Ibsen. Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings. Ed. J. L. Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.

xxi List of Figures

The Road to the Quintessence Fig. 1 George Bernard Shaw at 35. 1891. The National Portrait Gallery, London 8 Fig. 2 William Archer at 35. 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 9 Fig. 3 Theatre Program. A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London. 1889. Author’s personal collection 14 Fig. 4 Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer and Charles Charrington as Doctor Rank in A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London. June, 1889. Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 15 Fig. 5 Florence Farr. 1890. The Senate House Library, University of London 29 Fig. 6 Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler. London, 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 34

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891 Fig. 1 Title page of the frst edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. 1891. Author’s personal collection 56 Fig. 2 William. T. Stead. Ca. 1910. The W. T. Stead Resource Site. http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk 64 Fig. 3 . Self-Portrait with Palette. 1883. Oil on canvas. 92 × 72 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice 65

xxiii xxiv List of Figures

Fig. 4 Henrik Ibsen at the age of 35. 1863. Author’s personal collection 73 Fig. 5 Georg Brandes. 1870s. Frontispiece. Georg Brandes, Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Rasmus Anderson. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1886 79

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898 Fig. 1 Elizabeth Robins. Early 1890s. The Elizabeth Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 162 Fig. 2 Janet Achurch. Early 1890s. Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 171 Fig. 3 Henry Irving. Late 1880s. Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo 197 Fig. 4 Ellen Terry. Ca. 1890. The National Trust, Great Britain 201 Fig. 5 Edvard Munch. Theatre Program for Peer Gynt. Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, Paris. 1896. Lithographic crayon on paper. 250 × 298 mm. The Munch Museum, Oslo 216

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen, 1913 Fig. 1 Bernard Shaw. 1913-14. George Grantham Bain Collection, , Washington, D. C 262 Author’s Note

Unless otherwise indicated, all , including those from Ibsen’s Collected Works, are mine. In quoting from Shaw, I have left his spelling and punctuation intact, except for silent corrections of very rare misspell- ings of Norwegian names and occasional additions of commas in brack- ets; to avoid confusion, I have also italicized the titles of works.

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