Dublin’s First Introduction to Ibsen: The Realist Plays

Abstract

Such was the opinion expressed anonymously in the review of Edmund Gosse’s translation of Hedda Gabler, which appeared in the Dublin Review in 1891. Rumours of Ibsen’s moral depravity and of Ibsenism as a dangerous social addiction began to circulate in Dublin three years before the public had a chance to see one of his plays. Dublin’s status as a cultural satellite of England meant that plays that excited London reached Dublin sometimes after a time lag. This, however, did not apply to the flow of opinions. English papers were on sale in Dublin; Irish papers published London gossip; and Irish communities in London ensured the swift transference of ideas to Dublin. The story of the Irish reception of Ibsen begins, therefore, with the London controversy over his plays, an event that affected differently Irish people who were in England and those who stayed at home. The future authors of the Irish Revival, Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Moore and Lady Gregory, as well as their later opponent, D. P. Moran, witnessed at first hand the rage over the first professional production of A Doll’s House (1889) and the outcry against the public performance of the unlicensed Ghosts (1891). Moore and Shaw, moreover, were directly involved in the debates that surrounded these productions and the later premières of Hedda Gabler (1893) and The Master Builder (1893).

There is no other explanation of the momentary craze for Ibsen’s dramas in this country than that they represent the views of certain advanced thinkers in their hostility to the permanence of domestic ties. Their teaching may be summed up as a crusade against marriage as an intolerable wrong to a woman who happens to get tired of her husband in the inevitable friction of the fireside. So ardent are the votaries of these improved ethics, that they have gone to the length of hiring a theatre in London for the performance, as a free representation, of a play too repulsive in subject to be licensed as a public spectacle.¹