Why read/ watch plays? (P.3): Plays vs films

Before we begin, I’m going to say that I’m talking about plays in the broad sense: not only live performances but also texts and filmed plays and audio recordings (“Let’s hear a play”); I however exclude musicals.

If we compare cinema and theatre (in the sense of live performance), we can all name the advantages of theatre: the nearness of the audience to the actors, the interaction and immediacy, the fact that no two performances are the same. But if we compare cinema and drama (in the broad sense), I’m afraid most people would only talk about the advantages of cinematic language: the language of image, large scenes, visual effects, and above all, editing and the close-up. It is derogatory when a film or TV series is described as “stagey”; what’s the equivalent for the other way around? 

I myself have loved literature and cinema all my life—my interest in drama is relatively new—but I love Shakespeare. That’s why I want to examine these questions: are films actually superior to plays, or is cinematic language superior to the language of drama, as the derogatory use of “stagey” seems to suggest? What do plays do better than films?

Now you may argue that the word “stagey” only suggests that a film should use cinematic language, but let’s look at the word when it’s used for TV. In the past, TV series, especially TV adaptations of classic novels, were modelled after theatre; now they’re modelled after films, meaning that they’re now meant and expected to be cinematic. Look at the 1972 War and Peace or 1977 Anna Karenina for example. Some people disparage them as stagey, and in some ways these TV series are closer to plays—lots of dialogue and minimal camerawork—but this also means that the screenwriters and directors pay more attention to dialogue and let the scenes unfold. Both series are excellent adaptations that take Tolstoy’s novels seriously and convey the complexity of the characters. Now if you look at the 2013 TV adaptation of Anna Karenina, you can see that it’s modelled after cinema and dialogue is devalued. And I can’t help asking, why do they keep moving the camera? Why do they cut every 4 seconds? (I counted) Why do they not let the scene unfold? I couldn’t even watch beyond 5-10 minutes of the 2018 King Lear for the same reasons, despite my admiration for Anthony Hopkins and Florence Pugh as actors. 

I’m not saying that screen adaptations of classic novels should be closer to plays, nor that they shouldn’t employ cinematic language. I’m also not saying that I’m mainly interested in drama driven by dialogue, driven by words (as my friend Himadri would probably say, who loves plays more than films). But dialogue is increasingly devalued in our mainly visual world—the word “stagey” reflects that—and that I find very sad. 

Films and plays do different things and have different strengths—I love both. In a film, the story and conflict are driven by many things, including dialogue (which some filmmakers unfortunately seem to forget). In a play, drama is driven by dialogue: what we say and what we don’t say and how we say it and how we hide or deceive with words. 

Persona or Cries and Whispers for instance has to be a film—it would not work as a novel or a play or an audio performance. Conversely, Rosmersholm has to be a play—you could of course turn it into a film, but its ambiguity and intricacies cannot be communicated by image or cinematic language. 

And when I watch Shakespeare, which I can’t watch live all the time (I’m just a poor girl, from a poor family), the choice would more often be a recording of a live performance, or a filmed play (like the BBC Television Shakespeare from the 1970s-80s), than a film adaptation. Sometimes a Shakespeare film respects the text, such as the 1993 and 2012 Much Ado About Nothing. Very often, Shakespeare’s words are heavily cut. Chimes at Midnight on its own is probably a passable film, but Orson Welles condenses into two hours the two Henry IV plays, with some bits from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a Falstaff—Welles—film with lots of supporting characters: all the others are underdeveloped, but even Falstaff is sentimentalised and simplified. 

Some Shakespeare films also indicate something like a fear of words. The 2015 Macbeth—perhaps I’m being unfair as I didn’t watch all of it—breaks into pieces the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech, mixing in flashbacks and battle scenes and special effects and drowning music. The main actors, Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, also don’t know how to speak the words. 

Even when we look at Kurosawa’s adaptations of Shakespeare, Ran is a masterpiece, a work of art on its own separate from King Lear, but Throne of Blood is shallow compared to Macbeth: stripped of much dialogue, it is an exciting film, but doesn’t have the complexity of Macbeth; the main characters are reduced to a weak man urged on by an evil wife. Now you might say Throne of Blood uses cinematic language and I should judge it as a film, so I would say that it is not a profound, thought-provoking film. 

Now I have seen many film adaptations of plays, it would be interesting to watch play adaptations of films. 

Why read plays? (P.2): Plays vs novels

I know, I wrote that the last blog post was my response once and for all to the mantra “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” But I want to write about a different aspect: Why read plays? What do plays offer that novels do not? 

(Ibsen staring into your soul). 

Considering the popularity of novels, I think we can all name the advantages of novels. Some might argue that novels dig deeper into characters’ minds and have more psychological depth, but I don’t agree—look at Shakespeare—Hamlet and Macbeth and Brutus and many other characters question themselves, struggle with themselves, and people have analysed them for 400 years. But scope is one advantage: a play cannot have hundreds of characters and a wide range of experiences like War and Peace. Length and span are another: The Winter’s Tale might be an exception in making a jump of 16 years, but it doesn’t cover 16 years; War and Peace spans from 1805 to 1813, then jumps to 1820.

However, plays have their own strengths—I’m not even talking about plays as performance, but as text. Plays show a clash of perspectives. I won’t talk again about the range of views in Shakespeare—I think I’ve been annoying enough about this subject—you all know what I would say. Instead, look at Ibsen. In The Wild Duck, he shows the contrast between a character who thinks human beings need delusion and can’t cope with much of the truth, and a character who tears down a marriage to set it on a new foundation of truth and destroys everything. In An Enemy of the People, he depicts a man of integrity, a man of courage standing up for the truth, but at the same time also lets us see the concerns of the townspeople, and makes us feel uneasy about the heroic man. In Rosmersholm, he depicts three different people—or four if you count Mrs Helseth—grappling with a suicide and questioning, blaming themselves. What actually happened? Who is to blame? 

Occasionally you find a novel with the same quality. Tolstoy for instance enters different characters’ minds and depicts their different—clashing—perspectives. William Faulkner has multiple characters narrating the story, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But even when a novelist switches between different perspectives, there is narration—there is someone shaping how you see characters and events—you are always aware of the authorial presence. The closest a novel gets to a play in this aspect is the epistolary form: in Dangerous Liaisons, the finest epistolary novel I’ve read, you see the different perspectives, you see the manipulators set out their plan and see them at work, you read between the lines and imagine the effect on the receiver of each letter. 

Normally, a novel focuses on a single point of view, or has an omniscient or objective point of view. In the former case—when the story is narrated by the protagonist (such as Jane Eyre) or an observer/ another character (such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby), or it has a third-person narrator but mainly focuses on a single perspective (such as Jane Austen’s novels)—we see everything through that one perspective. With the third-person narrator who focuses on one character’s point of view, we can see the author: Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse for instance creates a double perspective, a dual voice—the narrator’s voice blending in with the character’s voice. But even when a novel has a first-person narrator, you can see the author somewhere between the lines: even though Lolita is seen through the eyes of Humbert Humbert, we can see—even without the framing device—that Nabokov is not Humbert Humbert. 

In the latter case, when the story has an omniscient or objective point of view, there is a narrator guiding the reader, which you don’t get in plays. Take Rosmersholm, for instance. What goes on in Rebecca’s mind when she cries out in joy and then rejects Rosmer’s proposal? And because there is no narrator and we are restricted to what the characters say, Ibsen gets us to see the situation in a certain way in the first two acts then turns everything upside down in Act 3. Even then, we only have fragments and there are things we would never know. What actually happened? What’s the truth about the relationship between Rosmer and Beata? What was on Beata’s mind when she decided to kill herself? 

Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) says: 

“I think Ibsen makes use of the fact that there *is* no narrator - no-one to interpret things, even by implication.

[…] This communicates a sense of mystery - not in the sense that the narrator isn’t giving us answers, but in the sense that there is no answer to give that may be articulated.

I don’t know to what extent this is possible in a novel.

A sense of the mystery of our human lives, of its inscrutability, is difficult to convey in a novel, where you’re aware of the authorial presence, even if the authors do their best to keep themselves in the background.”

Even in An Enemy of the People, a play that seems more straightforward than other Ibsen plays, there is a sense of mystery: what happens in Dr Stockman’s mind between Act 3 and Act 4 that he, when he has the chance to speak to people in town, decides not to speak about his findings about the baths but, instead, to have a rant about “the common man”? And more importantly, as Himadri has put it, why is the truth about the endangerment to public health so important to Dr Stockman, considering his contempt for the public? 

That sense of mystery is one of the fascinating things about Shakespeare. Why does Hamlet not act? What goes on in his mind when he tells Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery”? Why does Iago hate Othello so much that he sets out to destroy him? Does he actually suspect Othello of having slept with his wife? What does Viola see in Orsino? Where does Leontes’s jealousy come from? 

Let’s have a discussion. 

Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen

1/ In Rosmersholm, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, and—if I remember correctly—The Doll’s House, Ibsen seems closer to the ancient Greeks than to Shakespeare, in the sense that the drama lies not in what the characters are now doing, but in the discovery of, and reaction to, what they did in the past. There are two important differences though: the Greeks wrote about mythical characters, Ibsen wrote about ordinary people; the Greek plays are based on myths known to the audience, Ibsen’s plays have an element of surprise. You may, for example, read Oedipus the King and watch the way Oedipus slowly discovers the painful truth about his sins, which you already know; you may read Electra and watch her reaction to the news of Orestes’s death, which you already know is a trap; but reading Rosmersholm, you must piece together the picture at the same time as some of the characters. It’s captivating, but it’s also disturbing—you think you know someone, but you don’t—your perception of the characters changes, then changes again, then changes again as things unfold. And Ibsen is one of those writers who are utterly terrifying—there’s something harsh and uncompromising and ruthless about him. 

(I read the translation by James MacFarlane). 

2/ Rosmersholm is about Johannes Rosmer (former clergyman and owner of Rosmersholm) and his companion Rebecca West, one year after the suicide of Rosmer’s wife Beata. Like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Beata casts a long shadow after her death, seeming to never go away. The interesting part, I would argue, is that the play is not really a depiction of two people haunted by the past. When the play begins, one year after the suicide, Rosmer may avoid the bridge but he and Rebecca West both seem to live peacefully. The trouble only begins when Kroll, Beata’s brother, visits them again after a long time and, after an argument about Rosmer’s new ideas and apostasy, sows some seeds of doubt and guilt in his mind, breaking Rosmer’s peace of mind and the peace at Rosmersholm. Rosmer and Kroll also force Rebecca to confront the past and confess the truth—you think you know someone, but you don’t—it changes her and Rosmer’s perception of her and their relationship.

The play, I think, is more about the chaos that lies underneath the surface of our lives. A bit of disturbance and everything collapses. 

    

3/ Spoiler alert: those of you who have not read or seen the play are warned that for the rest of the blog post, I may discuss significant plot points. 

Rosmersholm is a complex, multi-layered play. There are lots of things to say. One can focus on the clash of ideas in the play; or the fanaticism and cruelty of the conservative Kroll; or the hypocrisy of the radical Peder Mortensgaard; or the impossibility of knowing the truth and understanding Beata; or the truth about Rosmer’s marriage with Beata (and their sex life); or Rosmer’s dependence and his need for a role model; or the joylessness at Rosmersholm and its influence on Rebecca; or the character of Mrs Helseth, the housekeeper; or the image of White Horses; or the ending; and so on. 

However, a couple of things particularly fascinate me. One is the theme of truth. For some reason, I generally only see people talk about social issues, feminism, etc. when talking about Ibsen, which is a very superficial reading of Ibsen’s plays. As my friend Himadri—the Ibsen expert—has pointed out, Ibsen is obsessed with the truth and its different aspects: the consequence of hiding the truth, the cost of exposing the truth, the importance of truth, the impossibility of knowing the truth… In this play, there are lots of questions. What’s the truth about the marriage at Rosmersholm? Was Beata oversexed or was Rosmer undersexed? Did she hold him back, constrain, limit him? Who actually drove her to suicide? Why did she, before death, reach out to Mortensgaard? What does Rebecca mean about her past? 

Rosmersholm is, I think, about the chaos that lies underneath the surface of daily life—there is peace when Rosmer doesn’t know and Rebecca doesn’t confront the truth—and when she does, everything collapses, his faith in her is destroyed, life is impossible. 

Another fascinating thing is that in Act 3, Ibsen places together two terrifying characters, confronting each other: one is Kroll, ready to do anything for his ideas, regardless of personal relationships; the other is Rebecca, ready to do anything for power over another person, regardless of life and death. In a way, Rebecca West has something of Hedda Gabler, one of the most terrifying female characters in literature (why is Ibsen like this, though?). 

The play also shows the difficulty—if not impossibility—of really knowing another person: you may live in the same house with someone, you may fall in love with them, but they may turn out to be completely different from what you thought. It’s a dreadful thought. 

This is a masterpiece, but I need some time to recover.

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

I picked up the play thinking it’s about a good man standing up for the truth—standing alone—and getting ostracised and punished for pointing out that the public baths were polluted. That isn’t wrong, but Ibsen’s play is a lot more complex and discomforting than that.

In the first two Acts, Ibsen introduces the characters and the conflict: Dr Thomas Stockman discovers that the public baths—the pride and a source of income for the town—are contaminated and have been making people ill; he has to expose the truth, and the two journalists, Hovstad and Billing, agree to publish his exposé in their paper, the Herald; the Mayor, Peter Stockman, who is also Thomas’s brother, opposes such a disclosure as it would ruin the town and damage his reputation. Dr Stockman doesn’t care about damage; he has the truth with him, he has the press, he has the Ratepayers Association (Aslaksen, the printer of the Herald, is also the chairman of the association). 

Tension rises in Act 3 as the Mayor walks around doing what politicians do—once people realise how much it would cost to replace the pipes and that would be paid for by taxpayers and that the public baths would be closed for at least two years, Hovstad and Billing and Aslaksen all switch to the Mayor’s side—the truth cannot come out, the article cannot be published. Even Katherine Stockman thinks her husband is foolish for not thinking about their family, not prioritising their children. Angry, betrayed, Dr Stockman now stands alone (though his wife, when she realises the hypocrisy and cowardice of others, decides to support him). If the article cannot be published, he would hold a public meeting himself. He would not be silenced. He would tell everyone the truth! 

As the Herald publishes the lies by the Mayor, reassuring the public that there’s nothing at all wrong with the public baths, one expects that at the public meeting in Act 4, Dr Stockman would tell his side of the story, that he would explain his investigation and discovery, that he would persuade the public to close down those baths of poison. But no. Instead, he says that “all our spiritual sources are polluted” and “our whole civic community is built over a cesspool of lies” (translated by James MacFarlane). 

Before Dr Stockman even speaks, the public are against him, but he already knows that most people are ignoramuses and fools—distinguished men such as himself are the minority. He goes on a rant against the mass, against the common man: 

“DR STOCKMAN […] Look at the difference between pedigree and cross-bred animals. […] Or I might mention dogs, which are so like humans in many ways. Think first of an ordinary mongrel—I mean one of those filthy, shaggy rough dogs that do nothing but run about the streets and cock their legs against all the walls. Compare a mongrel like that with a poodle whose pedigree goes back many generations, who has been properly fed and has grown up among quiet voices and soft music. Don’t you think the poodle’s brain will have developed quite differently from the mongrel’s? You bet it will!...” 

I’m not saying that I see Shakespeare everywhere I go, but that makes me think of a passage in Macbeth: 

“FIRST MURDERER We are men, my liege.

MACBETH Ay, in the catalogue you go for men,

As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept

All by the name of dogs. The valued file

Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,

The housekeeper, the hunter, every one

According to the gift which bounteous nature

Hath in him closed; whereby he does receive

Particular addition, from the bill

That writes them all alike. And so of men…” 

(Act 3 scene 1) 

To go back to Ibsen’s play, it is a disturbing scene. Dr Stockman goes from being a man of integrity, a man of courage to speaking like a fascist. That passage is pure eugenics. 

“DR STOCKMAN [with rising temper] When a place has become riddled with lies, who cares if it’s destroyed? I say it should simply be razed to the ground! And all the people living by these lies should be wiped out, like vermin!...” 

He speaks of love for the town, but he’s full of contempt for people. He must be denounced as an enemy of the people. He must be banished. 

What does that sound like? 

“BRUTUS There’s no more to be said, but he is banished

As enemy to the people and his country.

It shall be so.

ALL PLEBEIANS It shall be so, it shall be so!

CORIOLANUS You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate

As reek o’ th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my air, I banish you!...” 

(Coriolanus, Act 3 scene 3)  

Dr Stockman shares with Coriolanus the pride and the inflexibility and the contempt for the mass.   

An Enemy of the People is a disquieting play. It’s a play that makes you feel uncomfortable: all the men who close their eyes and take part in the cover-up are despicable and Dr Stockman is in the right about the baths, but he’s so uncompromising, so contemptuous, so unwilling to understand the concerns of people in the town. Even the character Aslaksen makes moderate people uncomfortable: he continually speaks of moderation, but what moderation can there be when the choice is between, on the one hand, an exposé of an endangerment to public health and, on the other hand, its cover-up? 

Thought-provoking play. 

PS: The original title is En folkefiende, which I think sounds better than An Enemy of the People. 

My 20 favourite plays not by Shakespeare [updated]

There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. Then I got into Shakespeare and my favourite plays a couple of years ago were all by Shakespeare. 

But now I have got a better grasp of drama, especially classical drama, so here’s a list of favourites that aren’t by Shakespeare (listed chronologically by the dramatist’s birth year, and grouped by country): 

• The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which is actually three plays: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides 
• Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus 
• Oedipus the King 
• Antigone 
• Electra by Sophocles 
• Hippolytus 
• Hecabe 
• The Bacchae by Euripides 
• Lysistrata 
• The Frogs by Aristophanes 
• Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe 
• The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster 
• The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley 
• The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur 
• Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca 
• Tartuffe 
• Don Juan 
• The Misanthrope by Molière 
• Phèdre by Jean Racine 
• The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen 

______________________________________

What can we see here? My tastes are predominantly Greek (and Shakespearean): 10 out of 20 plays are by the Athenian playwrights (or 12 out of 22 if you don’t count the Oresteia as one). Molière is another favourite. 

Only one play from the 19th century. No Goethe. No Chekhov—is that a surprise?—I struggled with his plays, having read only two, and much prefer him as a short story writer. No Oscar Wilde, simply because I haven’t read him—if “allowed” to include plays I’ve seen onscreen, I would name The Importance of Being Earnest (though it’s hard to say which play I would remove to make place for it). 

No Tennessee Williams, whom I liked at university. No one contemporary, but then the only one I know is Tom Stoppard—one day I’m going to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I would probably like. 

Now this list is a bit of a cheat—a list of favourite plays, by Shakespeare and other dramatists, would be much, much harder. 

Name your favourite plays. 

Update on 19/3/2026:

I would probably replace The Revenger’s Tragedy or The Changeling with Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. Now this is a great, psychologically complex, haunting play. 

Sanshiro and some curious references

I finished Sanshiro last night. I don’t have a lot to say—in the end, the characters are still opaque, unlike those in Soseki’s Kokoro and Botchan, and the only exception is Sanshiro’s friend Yojiro, but even he is not a character who would stay with you over time. The usual themes of change, modernisation, and Westernisation of Japan are there, and the novel has a lingering sadness and uncertainty. 

Perhaps my tastes are too Western. 

There are two things that caught my attention, however. First of all, there are many Ibsen references throughout the novel, from different characters.

Here is a conversation Sanshiro overhears, between Yojiro and Professor Hirota, about Mineko. 

““She’s so calm and patient, she would just go on chewing until the flavor came out.”

“She’s calm, all right,” said the Professor, “but wild, too.”

“It’s true she is wild. There’s something of the Ibsen woman about her.”

“With Ibsen women, it’s all out in the open. Mineko is wild deep inside. Of course, I don’t mean wild in the ordinary sense. Take Nonomiya’s sister: she has this kind of wild look at first glance, but in the end she’s very feminine. It’s an odd business.”” (Ch.6) 

(translated by Jay Rubin) 

Sanshiro has a crush on Mineko, so he later asks Yojiro. 

““What’s wild about her?”

“It’s not any one thing. All modern women are wild, not just Mineko.”

“You said she’s like an Ibsen character, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Which character did you have in mind?”

“Well… she’s just like an Ibsen character, that’s all.”

Sanshirō was not convinced, but he decided not to pursue the matter. They had walked a short way in silence when Yojirō said, “Mineko is not the only one like an Ibsen character. All women are like that nowadays. And not just women. Any man who’s had a whiff of the new atmosphere has something of Ibsen about him. People just don’t act freely the way Ibsen’s characters do. Inside, though, something is usually bothering them.”” (ibid.) 

I wonder if I look at it from the modern perspective, because I can’t see anything wild about Mineko and in the end, she does not defy conventions. But Sanshiro doesn’t think so either and the novel mostly focuses on his perspective, so perhaps Yojiro and the Professor know something that the main character doesn’t know. 

Yojiro mentions Ibsen again, and also mentions Shakespeare, when he’s making a speech campaigning to replace the Western professor with someone Japanese at the university: 

““De te fabula! Who gives a damn how many words Shakespeare used or how many white hairs Ibsen had? We don’t have to worry about ‘surrendering ourselves’ to stupid lectures like that. But it’s the University that suffers. We’ve got to bring in a man who can satisfy the youth of the new age. Foreigners can’t do it. First of all, they have no authority in the University.”” (ibid.) 

Why does he say that? I have no idea.  

The name of Ibsen pops up again when Professor Hirota has a rant with Sanshiro about change in Japan and hypervillains: 

““… Of course, when there’s too much glory, the hypervillains get a little annoyed with each other. When their discomfort reaches a peak, altruism is resurrected. And when that becomes a mere formality and turns sour, egoism comes back. And so on, ad infinitum. That’s how we go on living, you might say. That’s how we progress. Look at England. Egoism and altruism have been in perfect balance there for centuries. That’s why she doesn’t move. That’s why she doesn’t progress. The English are a pitiful lot—they have no Ibsen, no Nietzsche. They’re all puffed up like that, but look at them from the outside and you can see them hardening, turning into fossils.”” (Ch.7) 

Soseki was clearly obsessed with Ibsen when he was writing Sanshiro. That made me laugh though, “The English are a pitiful lot” hahaha. 

Later, when Sanshiro and Mineko are walking together, at her suggestion, he thinks to himself: 

“How would Mineko react if someone told her to live like Miwata Omitsu? Tokyo was different from the country, it was wide open, so perhaps most of the women here were like Mineko. He could only imagine what the others were like, but at a distance they did seem to be a little more old-fashioned than Mineko. It occurred to him how right Yojirō had been: she was an Ibsen woman. But was it only her disregard for convention that made her an Ibsen woman, or did it involve her deepest thoughts and feelings? He did not know.” (Ch.8) 

The disregard for convention is her walking with him without asking anyone’s permission. What about it is like an Ibsen woman? Perhaps I’m too modern to understand. 

Later, at a party, different characters debate whether physicists are naturalists—Nonomiya thinks so, because he himself is doing experiments on the pressure of light, whereas Professor Hirota doesn’t, because “You have to go about it artificially, with quartz threads and vacuums and mica, all these devices so that the pressure becomes visible to the eye of the physicist” (Ch.9). 

One more time, Ibsen is (randomly?) mentioned by entirely different characters. 

““Then physicists are romantic naturalists,” said Dr. Shōji, sitting diagonally opposite Nonomiya, and he offered a comparison: “In literature, that would be someone like Ibsen, I suppose.”

“True,” said the critic in the striped coat. “Ibsen has as many devices as Nonomiya, but I doubt if his characters follow natural laws the way light does.”” (ibid.) 

Isn’t it curious how often the name of Ibsen pops up in this novel? 

The second thing that caught my attention was about Shakespeare. Since I caught the Shakespeare bug, I’ve been noticing him everywhere. It is to be expected—Shakespeare is the greatest and most influential writer of all time—but it’s also a bit weird to actually notice it? Dickens, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Balzac, Proust… all reference him at some point, then I read Soseki’s Sanshiro and the main characters went to watch a performance of Hamlet, near the end of the book. 

“The movements of this Hamlet were wonderfully nimble. He moved grandly across the stage and imparted grand movement to the others. This was vastly different from Iruka’s restrained Noh style. Especially when he stood in the middle of the stage, stretching his arms out wide or glaring at the sky, he aroused such excitement that the spectators were conscious of nothing but him.

The dialogue, however, was in Japanese, translated Japanese, Japanese spoken with exaggerated intonations, unusual rhythms. It poured forth so fluently at times it seemed almost too eloquent. It was in a fine literary style, but it was not moving. Sanshirō wished that Hamlet would say something a little more characteristically Japanese. Where he expected him to say, “Mother, you must not do that. It is an affront to Father’s memory,” Hamlet would suddenly bring in Apollo or someone and smooth things over. Meanwhile, both mother and son looked ready to burst into tears. Sanshirō was only dimly aware of the inconsistency, however. The courage to pronounce the thing absurd was not forthcoming.” (Ch.12) 

I know that Soseki loves Shakespeare, so either that is a complaint about the Japanese translation, or it’s only Sanshiro’s thoughts and not shared by Soseki. 

More curious is an earlier conversation between Sanshiro and Professor Hirota about marriage. 

““Are there so many things that prevent people from marrying?”

The Professor looked at Sanshirō steadily through the smoke.

“You know that Hamlet didn’t want to marry. Maybe there was only one Hamlet, but there are lots of people like him.”” (Ch.11) 

Would you expect some characters in a novel to bring up Hamlet to discuss “matrimonial cripples”, i.e. people incapable of marrying? I didn’t. 

As he watches the performance, Sanshiro thinks about the conversation. 

“When Hamlet told Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery,” Sanshirō thought of Professor Hirota. No one like Hamlet could possibly marry, the Professor had said, which seemed true enough when you lingered over the poetry in the book, but on stage it seemed that Hamlet might just as well marry. After careful consideration, Sanshirō concluded that this was because the line “Get thee to a nunnery” was no good. The proof of this was that even after Hamlet had said it to Ophelia, you didn’t feel sorry for her.” (Ch.12) 

That sounds more like a comment on the performance than on the play itself. 

All these Ibsen and Shakespeare references in Sanshiro are a bit odd though. What do you think? 

Side note: If you’re subscribing to my blog by emails, the updates are currently not being sent because I’m out of credit on Mailchimp (until next month, I guess). Sorry about the inconvenience.  

Chekhov’s sadness

From “A Woman’s Kingdom”:

“…she thought, too, that it was too late to dream of happiness, that everything was over for her, and it was impossible to go back to the life when she had slept under the same quilt with her mother, or to devise some new special sort of life.” 

From “Three Years”:

““However that may be, one has to give up all thoughts of happiness,” he said, looking out into the street. “There is none. I never have had any, and I suppose it doesn’t exist at all. I was happy once in my life, though, when I sat at night under your parasol. Do you remember how you left your parasol at Nina’s?” he asked, turning to his wife…”

And: 

“Laptev was convinced that the millions and the business which was so distasteful to him were ruining his life and would make him a complete slave. He imagined how, little by little, he would grow accustomed to his position; would, little by little, enter into the part of the head of a great firm; would begin to grow dull and old, die in the end, as the average man usually does die, in a decrepit, soured old age, making everyone about him miserable and depressed. But what hindered him from giving up those millions and that business and leaving that yard and garden which had been hateful to him from his childhood?” 

From “My Life”:

“I did not grieve for Dubechnya. I grieved for my love, which, too, was threatened with its autumn. What an immense happiness it is to love and be loved, and how awful to feel that one is slipping down from that high pinnacle!” 

And: 

“He was carried away by his subject, and no longer thought of my sister, nor of his grief, nor of me. Life was of absorbing interest to him. She has America and her ring with the inscription on it, I thought, while this fellow has his doctor’s degree and a professor’s chair to look forward to, and only my sister and I are left with the old things.” 

From “Peasants”:

“The river was crossed by a rickety little bridge of logs, and exactly below it in the clear, limpid water was a shoal of broad-headed mullets. The dew was glistening on the green bushes that looked into the water. There was a feeling of warmth; it was comforting! What a lovely morning! And how lovely life would have been in this world, in all likelihood, if it were not for poverty, horrible, hopeless poverty, from which one can find no refuge! One had only to look round at the village to remember vividly all that had happened the day before, and the illusion of happiness which seemed to surround them vanished instantly.” 

And: 

“Granny believed, but her faith was somewhat hazy; everything was mixed up in her memory, and she could scarcely begin to think of sins, of death, of the salvation of the soul, before poverty and her daily cares took possession of her mind, and she instantly forgot what she was thinking about.” 

And:

“They lay down to sleep in silence; and the old people, troubled and excited by their reminiscences, thought how precious was youth, of which, whatever it might have been like, nothing was left in the memory but what was living, joyful, touching, and how terribly cold was death, which was not far off, better not think of it! The lamp died down. And the dusk, and the two little windows sharply defined by the moonlight, and the stillness and the creak of the cradle, reminded them for some reason that life was over, that nothing one could do would bring it back. . . . You doze off, you forget yourself, and suddenly someone touches your shoulder or breathes on your cheek—and sleep is gone; your body feels cramped, and thoughts of death keep creeping into your mind. You turn on the other side: death is forgotten, but old, dreary, sickening thoughts of poverty, of food, of how dear flour is getting, stray through the mind, and a little later again you remember that life is over and you cannot bring it back. . . .” 

All of these passages are translated by Constance Garnett. 

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It’s interesting how last year I discovered many new writers and got some more favourites (Edith Wharton, Murasaki Shikibu, Soseki, Akutagawa, Cao Xueqin, etc.) but this year seems to be more like a year of rediscoveries. I read a few writers I never read before (kinda liked Marlowe, didn’t really get along with Ben Jonson, Balzac, nor Zola), but the main thing this year is that I reread Anna Karenina (again seeing it as the greatest novel of all time and the novel closest to my heart) and that I rediscovered Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov.

What is it about this year that I finally see the greatness that more or less eluded me several years ago? Or am I simply older?  

Hedda Gabler

The translation is by Una Ellis-Fermor. 

1/ At the centre of the play is the marriage between Jørgen Tesman and Hedda (née Gabler).

Jørgen is dull—respectable and learned but dull, and not particularly perceptive. He is reminiscent of both Charles Bovary and Mr Casaubon. Ibsen shows from the start that Jørgen can be simple and naïve, failing to get his aunt’s meaning, and we can quickly see the contrast between him and his new wife in the scene with Thea Elvsted: he notices nothing whereas Hedda quickly sees through her old friend’s little lies. 

Hedda Gabler Tesman however is not Emma Bovary, and definitely not Dorothea Brooke. Dorothea marries Mr Casaubon because of her naïve idealism and misjudgement of his character, Hedda has no delusion. Hedda shares with Emma ennui and contempt for her husband and her marriage, but unlike Emma, she is neither sentimental nor sensual. She doesn’t seem to like sex. 

In some ways, she is more like Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country: both like money and luxury, both seem indifferent to sex, and both are manipulative. The main difference, I think, is that Edith Wharton’s character manipulates in order to gain money and social status, whereas Hedda manipulates in order to—what? 

2/ In The Wild Duck, Gregers interferes in Hjalmar’s life partly because of his ideals, and partly because he wants to get back at his own father. At the beginning, he gets all the skeletons out of the Ekdal family, to set Hjalmar’s marriage on a new foundation of truth, but he doesn’t stop there. He goes further, and in a way wants Hjalmar’s family to be worse off and little Hedwig not to get help, just so he can be proven right and his father wrong—like it’s all a contest, a game. 

Now let’s look at Hedda: 

“MRS ELVSTED There’s something behind all this, Hedda. 

HEDDA True; there is. I want, for once in my life, to have power over a human being’s fate.” 

(Act 2) 

Similarly, Hedda wants to interfere in people’s lives, and she does so only because she wants to have power over a human being’s fate. She wants to manipulate and corrupt and even ruin Ejlert Løvborg only because the idea that he has been reformed by the simple Thea offends her sensibilities. 

But why? 

3/ It is difficult to read Hedda Gabler, especially Act 3, without strong feeling of contempt and loathing for the titular character—she is despicable. Compared to other trapped wives in literature such as Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Effi Briest, Dorothea Brooke, etc., Hedda is not very sympathetic—I would even say that she hardly has any redeeming quality. Self-awareness, perhaps.  

I’ve seen from the start that she is cold and callous about small things such as Jørgen’s old slippers or his aunt’s hat, humiliating the old woman for no reason, but it’s in Act 3 where it becomes clear that Hedda is indifferent about everything, even in matters of life and death. Nothing moves her, nothing matters, and it is terrifying. Her irrational, inexplicable hatred, if it may be called hatred, gets to the peak at the end of Act 3. In a way, Hedda is reminiscent of Iago in her “motiveless malignity” (to use Coleridge’s words).

However, unlike Iago, Hedda also hates herself: she hates people and society and her marriage; she also hates herself for being a coward. As she says, she has accepted and walked into this marriage herself, which she despises. She can’t help feeling contempt for the Tesman family, who is socially beneath her. But she lacks the courage to walk out. 

Hedda hates Thea also because Thea has the courage to leave her husband, the courage she herself doesn’t have.  

4/ In a way, the characters in Hedda Gabler can be put into 2 groups: the good-natured, kind, “simple” Jørgen, Thea, Aunt Juliane, and even Ejlert belong together; in the other group with Hedda is Brack. Ibsen creates Hedda, and creates Brack, the judge and family friend, who is cold and ruthless and calculating in his own way—he sees through her and knows her fears, and near the end of the play, destroys her illusion, holds some power over her, and inadvertently pushes her to the inevitable. 

Ibsen ends Act 3 with such terror that one wonders how he keeps the dramatic tension afterwards, but he does. And see what he does in Act 4, especially the ending!  

5/ So far I have been vague. Those of you who haven’t read/seen the play and don’t want to know important plot details may want to stop here.  

A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler may be seen as connected, because A Doll’s House is about a woman who walks out and leaves her husband, Ghosts is about a woman who runs away then returns to her husband and suffers 19 years of misery and other consequences, and Hedda Gabler on the surface is about a woman who gets into a marriage she despises and has no courage to walk out. But they don’t have much in common: each play is a study of a different situation, a different kind of woman. 

I saw that some people called Hedda Gabler a feminist play, which I found laughable. Hedda is too cold, manipulative, and full of self-loathing to be a strong woman or a feminist figure. Hers is not simply the predicament of a woman strapped in an unhappy marriage and bound in a patriarchal society—it is a lot more complex, and to see the play in mere feminist terms is to reduce it, to strip it of complexity and ambiguity. It also fails to answer lots of questions about the play: why does Hedda hate that Ejlert is now reformed and has great potential for success? Why does she goad him back into drinking? If she wants to retain her hold and influence over him, offended that he has been tamed by Thea, why? Why does she give him a gun afterwards? Why does she destroy the manuscript? She has some illusion about a free and beautiful action, but why? 

The constraints of a patriarchal society alone cannot explain her actions. Hedda is not a victim. Hedda Gabler is fascinating because she is complex and her motivations are complex.  

Feminist criticism is often offensive as it reduces men and women to simple categories, and doesn’t see the individual. 

The Wild Duck

1/ In many ways, The Wild Duck is more complex than Ghosts. Ghosts has 5 characters: Mrs Alving, her son Oswald, Manders (the sanctimonious pastor), Engstrand (the carpenter), and Regina (his daughter). The Wild Duck has 15 characters that have a name or nickname, plus 6 other guests at the party and several servants. 

Ghosts has 3 acts. The Wild Duck has 5 acts. 

(The translation is by R. Farquharson Sharp). 

2/ At the party, Gregers says to Hjalmar “Why should I not invite my best and only friend?”. A few sentences later, we’re told that they haven’t met for 16-17 years. Strange, that.  

3/ When we read Ibsen, it’s important to be aware of chronology because the plays, I’ve been told, are in dialogue with each other. After Ghosts, he wrote An Enemy of the People, and then The Wild Duck. 

At the most basic level, if Ghosts is about the danger of living for years with a lie, The Wild Duck is about the danger of pursuing the absolute truth. At the beginning of the play, the Ekdal family are living in illusion: old Ekdal, who has gone to jail because of someone else’s guilt and lost everything, clings to his past as a lieutenant and a hunter, and uses the attic as a forest; Hjalmar lives with the illusion that he is an inventor, who can restore good name to his father; both are ignorant of old Werle’s role in the downfall, and grateful for his support after the arrest. Hjalmar also doesn’t know about old Werle’s violation of his wife Gina before their marriage. 

The troubles begin when Gregers, after being away for a long time, returns and enters their house and takes it upon himself to reveal the truth and destroy all illusions. 

Interestingly, Ibsen skips that moment altogether and jumps to its aftermath, but what a scene that follows it! Gregers destroys two illusions, about old Werle (his father) and about the marriage between Hjalmar and Gina, and Hjalmar’s conversation with her reveals another painful truth—that they live not on his earnings as a photographer but mostly on old Werle’s payment for old Ekdal’s copying. 

4/ Why does Gregers do so? I don’t think it’s because of some ideal as he says, at least it’s not the only reason. I think it’s also his way of fighting against his father and dealing with, or perhaps compensating for, the web of lies in his own family. 

He is cold and brutal. The worst part is that he’s absolutely convinced he’s doing the right thing. 

It’s when Hedwig (Gina’s daughter) receives a present from old Werle that I see his true nature: 

 “GREGERS Yes, Hjalmar—now we shall see who is right, he or I.” 

(Act 4) 

It’s being proven right and getting back at the father that Gregers is interested in. He doesn’t seem to think about the fact that for a long time old Werle has tried to pay back for his actions by providing for the Ekdal family when he’s not expected to do so. 

Just as Ghosts gets grimmer and grimmer, The Wild Duck becomes more and more extreme. The Ekdal family have too many skeletons and suddenly they’re all out, one by one. Readers may have different thoughts about Gregers’s revelations to Hjalmar, but there’s no justification for what he says to the 14-year-old Hedwig. 

5/ In the play, Ibsen sets up a dilemma—we have Gregers on one side, with his uncompromising insistence on the truth, and the neighbour Relling on the other side, who thinks people should live in delusion and avoid the truth. There is no simple answer. I think everyone would agree that Gregers is a fanatic, tearing apart a family because he thinks he’s setting it on a new foundation of truth, but in Ghosts, Ibsen has depicted the consequences of living for years in deceit and self-deception, and in The Wild Duck itself, Mrs Sørby hides nothing and her new marriage with old Werle would be the true marriage that Hjalmar doesn’t have with Gina.

Interestingly, Gregers, the one who wants to strip his friend of all delusion, has one himself: he is greatly mistaken about his friend. If his action is a kind of test, Hjalmar fails it because he doesn’t have the character, the strength to overcome it, to forgive everyone and start afresh. The Wild Duck is largely a tragedy, but part of the comedy is because Hjalmar is essentially weak and doesn’t have the ideals his friend wants: in front of Gregers, he bravely tears in half the deed from old Werle, only to paste the pieces back together afterwards; he makes a scene of leaving his wife, having learnt of her past, so Gina makes him a meal and packs his case, but after they eat some time in silence:  

“HJALMAR If I decided to do so, could I—without being exposed to intrusion on anyone’s part—put up for a day or two in the sitting-room there?

GINA Of course you could, if only you would.

HJALMAR Because I don’t see there is any possibility of getting all father’s things out in a moment.” 

(Act 5) 

So he tells himself. 

6/ I won’t write about symbols and poetic elements in The Wild Duck because Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) has written a brilliant blog post about it, including the wild duck: 

https://argumentativeoldgit.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/the-wild-duck-by-henrik-ibsen/

Himadri also writes about the characters, and raises the interesting point that old Werle, far from being immorally pure, may not be the monster that his son thinks he is. 

7/ If you’ve got this far, perhaps you’re acquainted with the play or indifferent to spoilers, but here I’m going to write a bit about the ending so those of you who haven’t read the play, be warned.

In the ending, after the devastating moment, Ibsen presents two opposing visions: are you with Relling, or are you with Gregers? Is Gregers too naïve and idealistic? Or is Relling too cynical? 

That is something to think about—I’ll probably need to consider it for some time. One thing is clear, however: 

“GREGERS Hedwig has not died in vain. You saw how his grief called out all the best that was in him.” 

(ibid.) 

I don’t doubt that Hjalmar’s grief is deep and genuine, especially when he realises his own cruelty, but I’d say that Hedwig dies a meaningless death. That’s why it’s so painfully tragic.  

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

So that I don’t get shouted for having lived in Norway and not knowing Ibsen, I picked up Ghosts, translated by R. Farquharson Sharp. I had read A Doll’s House, but it was years ago and needs a revisit. 

The two plays are related: at the most basic level, A Doll’s House is about a woman leaving her husband, Ghosts is about the consequence of a woman not leaving her terrible husband. The two situations are however totally different: Mrs Alving is not Nora and Mr Alving is not Torvald.  

1/ This is how Ghosts begins: Engstrand, a carpenter, is talking to a young woman called Regina and he seems to be harassing her (not in the sexual sense), but quickly we realise that she’s his daughter, though they don’t really sound like father and daughter. Then Engstrand leaves, and a pastor named Manders arrives to see Mrs Alving, the mistress of the house. Manders gives some unsolicited advice to Regina, as people do, so Regina leaves the room and soon afterwards Mrs Alving enters, to discuss the orphanage business with Manders. 

Quite soon Manders turns out to be an insufferable, sanctimonious prick, chastising Mrs Alving and her son Oswald, who has just returned from France, for neglecting their duties and having immoral views. Manders especially condemns her as a bad wife and a bad mother, for having once tried to leave her husband and later sent her son away. Then it’s Mrs Alving’s turn to speak and she reveals the truth that has been hidden from everyone for decades: because of Manders, she returned to her incorrigible, profligate husband and suffered a miserable marriage for 19 years. She sent Oswald away so he wouldn’t be corrupted by his father. 

The revelation changes the entire tone and dynamics. By the end of Act 1, everything has been completely shattered for Manders.

Then comes this bit: 

“MANDERS [softly, and with emotion] Is that all I accomplished by the hardest struggle of my life? 

MRS ALVING Call it rather the most ignominious defeat of your life.

MANDERS It was the greatest victory of my life, Helen; victory over myself.

MRS ALVING It was a wrong done to both of us.

MANDERS A wrong?—wrong for me to entreat you as a wife to go back to your lawful husband, when you came to me half distracted and crying “here I am, take me!” Was that a wrong?

MRS ALVING I think it was. 

MANDERS We two do not understand one another.

MRS ALVING Not now, at all events. 

MANDERS Never—even in my most secret thoughts—have I for a moment regarded you as anything but the wife of another. 

MRS ALVING Do you believe what you say?

MANDERS Helen—! 

MRS ALVING One so easily forgets one’s own feelings.

MANDERS Not I. I am the same as I always was.” 

(Act 2) 

This is a great scene: having learnt the horrible truth, Manders doesn’t change and doesn’t have a bad conscience. Instead, he clings to his so-called principles and continues to delude himself, to convince himself that he did right. 

2/ Living death. Loveless marriage. Masks. Deceit. I can see Ibsen’s influence on Ingmar Bergman. 

3/ In English the title is translated as Ghosts, but it cannot convey the full sense of the title in the original: gengangere (or gjengangere in Norwegian) mean “ghosts” and “things that recur or repeat themselves”. 

There seems to be a slightly different meaning in this passage:   

“MRS ALVING […] I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists against in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us, but they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them.” 

(ibid.)

Not only is Mr Alving a ghost that doesn’t go away, doesn’t stay in the past, but “we are all ghosts”. 

4/ Some readers may defend Manders by saying that he’s not a hypocrite, that he genuinely believes life is about doing your duty and not pursuing happiness, and lives accordingly. I do think he’s a hypocrite, however, because life to him is not only about duty. Manders has a great fear of people’s gossips and his own loss of reputation: after he made Mrs Alving return to her husband, for decades he never came back to the house till now, when she decides to open an orphanage; he convinces Mrs Alving not to insure the orphanage for fear of people’s talks; and at the end, when the building is burnt to the ground and it’s probably because of Manders’s carelessness, he says that “the spiteful attacks and accusations” are “almost the worst part of the whole thing”.

The revelation shocks him into some sort of understanding, but he remains himself, utterly himself in the end.  

5/ An interesting thing is that the truth doesn’t seem to shock Oswald. It changes nothing—his guilt and self-blame may go but the fear remains, and nothing can change his condition. He is too occupied with his terror to ask Mrs Alving why she has been lying to him his whole life. 

6/ Ibsen’s play is essentially about revisiting the past and understanding it differently: Oswald learns that the disease is inherited and not his fault; Regina learns something about her mother and realises that a relationship with Oswald is now impossible; Manders learns about his role in Mrs Alving’s long suffering; and even Mrs Alving, near the end of the play, realises that she’s partly to blame for Mr Alving’s dissipation: 

“MRS ALVING It gave me a holiday feeling only to look at him, full of irrepressible energy and exuberant spirits.

OSWALD What then?

MRS ALVING Well, then this boy, full of the joy of life—for he was just like a boy, then—had to make his home in a second rate town which had none of the joy of life to offer him, but only dissipations. He had to come out here and live an aimless life; he had only an official post. He had no work worth devoting his whole mind to; he had nothing more than official routine to attend to. He had not a single companion capable of appreciating what the joy of life meant; nothing but idlers and tipplers—

[…]

MRS ALVING Your poor father never found any outlet for the overmastering joy of life that was in him. And I brought no holiday spirit into his home, either.

OSWALD You didn’t, either? 

MRS ALVING I had been taught about duty, and the sort of thing that I believed in so long here. Everything seemed to turn upon duty—my duty, or his duty—and I am afraid I made your poor father’s home unbearable to him, Oswald.” 

(Act 3) 

The joy of life (livsglæde or livsglede) is a central theme in the play, and this is a magnificent moment. For a large part of the play, Mrs Alving speaks of her dead husband with only hatred and contempt, but now she recognises her own part in the failed marriage and sees her past in a startlingly different light. 

This is a great play.