Hedda Gabler

Context

Henrik Ibsen is one of the world's greatest dramatists. He was the leading figure of an artistic renaissance that took place in Norway around the end of the nineteenth century, in which the work of the artist Edward Munch also played a part. Ibsen lived from 1828 to 1906. He grew up in poverty, studied medicine for a while, and then abandoned that to write plays. In 1858, he published his first play, The Vikings at Helgeland, and married Susannah Thoresen, the daughter of a pastor.

Ibsen obtained a scholarship to travel to Italy, where he wrote the plays that would establish his reputation, Brand and Peer Gynt. These were long, historical verse-plays. He lived most of the rest of his life in Italy and in Germany. Starting in 1869, he began to write prose plays, giving up the verse form. In 1877, he began what would become a series of five plays in which he examines the moral faults of modern society. The group includes A Doll's House and The Wild Duck. In many ways, Hedda Gabler, a later play completed in 1890, belongs to this group. It presents a detailed picture of society, sketching class differences between the aristocratic and bourgeois worlds.

Like all of Ibsen's plays, Hedda Gabler was originally written in Norwegian and is full of untranslatable wordplay. James Joyce admired Ibsen so much that as a youth he attempted to teach himself Norwegian in order to read Ibsen in the original.