The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Henrik Ibsen · a play in four acts · seven characters and one set · published by Gyldendal in Copenhagen, December 1890, and first staged at the Residenztheater, Munich · scored on Ibsen’s Dano-Norwegian, read from knowledge, with Michael Meyer’s translation (1962) and William Archer and Edmund Gosse’s (1891) for sense; no text in hand, and no translation quoted
Mode
Tragedy of character in the form of a domestic comedy; the well-made play emptied of its thesis
Mythos
The father’s daughter who dies by the father’s weapons; the rival’s child destroyed by fire; a Dionysian freedom imagined and never lived
Phase
Under two days: a morning after the return from the wedding journey, the afternoon, the next dawn, the evening
Presentation
Drama; four acts in one set, seven characters on stage and one dying unseen, two deaths, one offstage and one in the inner room
Register
From Tesman’s fussy exclamations and Aunt Julle’s chatter to Brack’s insinuating politeness and Hedda’s short, cutting lines and the silences around them
Scale
One household, its money, its rank and its scholarship; a marriage, a pregnancy no one names, a manuscript and a pair of pistols
Governing Proposition
A general’s daughter, home from a six-month wedding journey with a scholar she married for want of anything better, turns a will that has never had anything to do upon the only material within reach, which is other people’s lives; she can shape nothing, so she destroys what she can, and then herself. The wager of the play is that such a life can be shown without once being explained: no confidant, no soliloquy, no thesis, only a room, a few objects and what is said around them, so that the audience knows her confinement by being confined with her.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play has one set and never leaves it: the drawing room of the villa the Tesmans have taken, which belonged to the late Lady Falk, with an inner room behind it holding a piano and the portrait of General Gabler. The first act is a morning, the day after Jørgen Tesman and his wife have come home from a wedding journey of six months. The second is the afternoon, the third the next dawn, the fourth the evening of that day. Everything happens in under two days, and nothing that happens outside these two rooms is seen.
Ibsen wrote it in the Dano-Norwegian of his time, the written Norwegian of 1890, and Gyldendal published it in Copenhagen in December of that year; it was first staged at the Residenztheater in Munich. It is a play in four acts, and the text he published survives complete. Seven characters appear: Tesman, a scholar; Hedda, his wife, born Gabler; Miss Juliane Tesman, his aunt; Mrs Thea Elvsted; Judge Brack; Ejlert Løvborg; and Berte, the maid. An eighth, Aunt Rina, is dying offstage, and by the last act she is dead. She is never seen.
The title gives the heroine the name she had before her marriage. She is the General’s daughter before she is anyone’s wife, and his pistols, a pair, are in the house with her. The play does not say why she married Tesman, or why she does anything that follows. It shows a woman of rank and intelligence in a household whose values she despises, with nothing to do, and it lets the audience watch what she does with that nothing.
Movement II
Aunt Julle calls in the morning in a new hat, and Hedda pretends to take it for the maid’s. It is the first thing she does in the play, and it is the whole of her contempt for the Tesman world in one gesture. Tesman unwraps a pair of slippers Aunt Rina embroidered for him and is moved; Hedda will not look at them. Between the hat and the slippers the marriage is shown entire, before anyone has said a word about it.
No one explains. The exposition is done through these objects, through Aunt Julle’s chatter, and through Tesman’s fond exclamations, which he repeats until they are the man. Hedda’s lines are short, and the silences around them say more. She asks to have the stove lit. Behind the talk stand Tesman’s debts for the villa and the professorship he expects.
Then Thea Elvsted comes, whom Hedda knew at school and once threatened to burn the hair off. Thea comes because of Ejlert Løvborg, a scholar with a past that Hedda shares. Thea tells of his reform, in which she has been his comrade, and Hedda is jealous of what another woman has been to him. Judge Brack, the friend of the house, is all insinuating politeness; he speaks of a triangle as a pleasantry, and the play builds its plot on that figure.
Movement III
In the afternoon Hedda takes up one of her father’s pistols and fires it, in sport, at Brack. Løvborg calls. He has a published book, and its sequel in manuscript, on the future course of civilisation; he could compete with Tesman for the professorship, and he withdraws from it. Hedda shows him the photographs of the wedding journey, and over them, under her husband’s nose, the two of them speak of their past.
There is a drinking party at Brack’s that evening, and Løvborg goes to it. Hedda pictures him coming back from it with vine leaves in his hair. It is her dream of beauty and of a freedom she cannot live, and the play gives the image the outline of a god of wine and release, Dionysus, set down in a provincial town at a bachelor party.
Dawn shows what came of it. Tesman reports the party, and in his report the vine leaves collapse into what a night of drink at Brack’s amounts to. The manuscript Løvborg dropped is in Hedda’s keeping, and she does not give it back. She gives him one of her father’s pistols and asks that it be done beautifully.
Movement IV
The stove she asked to have lit in the first act is the instrument of the third act’s end. Alone, Hedda takes the manuscript and feeds it into the fire by handfuls, and she speaks to it as she burns it: it is Thea’s child and Løvborg’s, and she is burning it. The burning was prepared years before, at school, in the threat to burn off Thea’s hair. It is the height of the play, and it is dreadful rather than exalted.
The scene has the shape of the Medea: the destruction of a rival’s offspring by the woman shut out. The play keeps the shape and shrinks its matter to a sheaf of paper and a domestic stove. That is its method with myth throughout. The Dionysian becomes a drinking party at Brack’s, the infanticide becomes a manuscript, and the woman who performs them never grows larger than the room she does them in.
The play has no confidant to hear what she feels as she does it, and no soliloquy in which to say it. A narrated version would have to tell its reader what Hedda feels. The play declines to, and its knowledge is that no one, perhaps not Hedda, can say it.
Movement V
In the evening the house is in mourning for Aunt Rina, and Aunt Julle calls again. Brack brings the news of Løvborg’s death. He was shot at Mademoiselle Diana’s, not in the temple as Hedda had wished but in the bowels, in a brothel. The beautiful act she wanted for him did not happen. Brack knows whose pistol it was, and his hold over her is the threat of a courtroom and its scandal, which she fears more than anything.
The household closes over the gap. Tesman and Thea are already sorting Løvborg’s notes. Brack settles into the place of the friend of the house. Hedda, pregnant, though she has never let the word be said, goes into the inner room, under her father’s portrait. A wild dance tune is played on the piano; Tesman reproves her for it.
Then the shot. Brack, over the body, answers it with the conventional phrase of his world, that people do not do such things, and the terror turns, in a line, to a terrible comedy. More than a century and a third of readers and actresses have not settled why she does it: whether what the play reveals is social or temperamental, a woman denied a vocation or a will that could have used none. The play does not tell. It shows the house, the objects, the father’s weapons and the inner room, and leaves the question standing there.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract anything and something breaks. The hat Hedda pretends to take for the maid’s is her contempt for the Tesman world in one gesture, and it is the first thing she does. The slippers Aunt Rina embroidered, which Tesman unwraps and Hedda will not look at, set the house’s sentiment against her. Thea’s account of Løvborg’s reform makes Hedda’s jealousy possible; the school memory of threatening to burn off Thea’s hair prepares the burning of the manuscript. The pistols are shown in the first act, fired in sport at Brack in the second, given to Løvborg in the third and traced by Brack in the fourth. What could go: the professorship thread, slack once Løvborg withdraws, and a little of Aunt Julle’s second visit.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a woman of rank and intelligence, formed by her father’s world and given nothing to do in it, married for want of anything better into a household whose values she despises, turns her unused will on other people’s lives, and finding she can shape nothing, destroys what she can and then herself. Beside it the play shows the pressure of respectability on a woman exactly: her horror of scandal is greater than her horror of anything, and Brack’s hold over her at the end is the threat of a courtroom, not of the act. The pregnancy she will not name completes it. Held off the top because the inner account is withheld so steadily that part of the disclosure stays a case observed from outside.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The register is a drawing room, and the elevations are dreadful rather than exalted, and few. The summit is the end of the third act: Hedda alone at the stove, feeding the manuscript in by handfuls and speaking to it as the child of Thea and Løvborg. The second is the close: a wild dance tune from the inner room, Tesman’s reproof, the shot, and Brack’s conventional phrase over the body, which turns the terror to a terrible comedy. The vine leaves Hedda imagines in Løvborg’s hair are her dream of beauty, and the beautiful never comes: his shot goes to the bowels in a brothel. That irony is the point, and it caps the axis: elevation is what the play refuses its heroine.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is present and partly built. Hedda is the general’s daughter before she is anyone’s wife: the title gives her maiden name, the pistols are the father’s inheritance, and she dies by them under his portrait. The burning of the manuscript as a child has the shape of the Medea, the destruction of the rival’s offspring. The vine leaves call up Dionysus, a freedom she imagines and cannot live. These carry weight in the plot and are not laid on as atmosphere. What holds the axis below the gate is that the play keeps them ironised and domestic: the Dionysian is a drinking party at Brack’s, the Medea a sheaf of paper, and Hedda never becomes a figure larger than the room. The work builds a case more than a myth.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the well-made play of Scribe and Sardou, whose machinery Ibsen keeps, the incriminating object, the timed exits, the secret from the past, and his own prose dramas of the 1870s and 1880s. The swerve is in what it refuses: no thesis, no raisonneur, no cause to argue as in A Doll’s House or Ghosts, and a central figure given no explanation of herself. A heroine without an articulated motive, unsympathetic and destructive, at the centre of a tragedy, was the real risk. Held below the top because the larger break, the prose tragedy of contemporary bourgeois life with its secrets surfacing, Ibsen had made a decade before, and this play perfects and darkens that form rather than founding it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. One room, never left, with a further room behind it: Hedda’s world is the set, and the inner room with the General’s portrait and the piano is where she retreats and where she dies. The play knows her confinement by confining its audience. Its other instrument is the withheld statement: no soliloquy, no confidant who hears the truth, and the meaning lives in objects and in what is said around them, the hat, the slippers, the stove she asks to have lit in the first act and uses in the third. Brack’s talk of a triangle is social banter and the plot’s actual geometry. Held off the top only by the residue of the well-made machinery, the coincidence of the dropped manuscript.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, not promise: more than a century and a third of interpretation without a settled answer to the play’s first question, why she does it. Shaw, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), read her as the product of an idealism with nothing to attach to; psychoanalytic readings as a case of hysteria and repressed sexuality; feminist criticism as the type of the woman denied a vocation; others as an existential figure of boredom. On the stage she is the Hamlet of actresses, a role each generation has made different. The properties keep giving up new readings: Thea’s hair, the slippers, the pregnancy no one names. Held a step below the summit because the play’s openness is concentrated in one figure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is European drama of the late nineteenth century, into which Ibsen’s realist prose plays entered as the main force of change. Intrinsic force: the play makes a tragedy of character out of a protagonist the audience can neither like nor fully read, with the plot carried by subtext and objects, and in that it points past the social problem play toward the drama of interiority that Chekhov and Strindberg would make. Held below the top because the reorganisation of the field belongs more to Ibsen’s realist cycle as a whole, and to A Doll’s House and Ghosts first, than to this play singly. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it entered the repertory of the major European theatres within a few years, drew Shaw’s book in its first year, and gave the modern stage one of its defining roles.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The text survives whole, as Ibsen published it, with no question of transmission. Its span is 136 years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries, and it stands at the top of that step’s usual band. Presence is continuous and very wide: staged without break since 1891 wherever Western theatre is played, among the most performed plays of the European repertory, translated into the world’s major languages, filmed and televised repeatedly, and taught in schools and universities. It has outlived its conditions: the professorship, the widow’s villa and the scandal of a lady at a bachelor party are history, and the play is staged for what they pressed upon. Not higher, because that presence is mainly theatrical and academic.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the original as far as translation carries it; the grain of the Norwegian is neither credited nor charged. The construction is among the most exact in drama: every property planted and paid, every exit timed so that the right two people are left alone, the time compressed to under two days without strain. The dialogue carries character in idiom: Tesman’s fond exclamation, repeated until it is the man; Brack’s insinuating politeness; Hedda’s short lines and the silences around them. The exposition of the first act is done through the hat, the slippers and Aunt Julle’s chatter, without one speech of explanation. The ending is executed with complete economy. Charged a little: the dropped manuscript is a convenience of the well-made play, and Thea is drawn thinner than the others.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Aunt Julle’s new hat and Tesman’s pleasure in his slippers, which are domestic comedy, and Hedda’s shot to the temple under the General’s portrait. One law governs both: a life that will not live by the rules of the house it is in, and cannot make its own, is ground between respectability and its own contempt. The comedy is not relief from the tragedy but its medium; Tesman’s devotion to the domestic industries of Brabant belongs to the same small world as Brack’s blackmail, and the last line sets the conventional phrase against the act. The range is narrow in setting and wide in tone, from farce to horror in one room. Held off the top because the law is proved over a small field.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The play holds a good deal inside one room, and holds it rather than listing it. Consciousness: Hedda’s, never stated and always present. The family: the Tesman aunts and their care, the dead father, a marriage, a pregnancy. Money and class: Tesman’s debts for the villa, the expected professorship, the general’s daughter married down to a middle-class scholar, the distance between Brack’s world and the aunts’. Work and thought: two kinds of scholarship, the antiquarian and the visionary, in competition for one post. Sexuality and its policing: Løvborg’s past, Mademoiselle Diana, Brack’s triangle. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state, history as an agent, the sacred and the natural order are absent or faint, and what it encompasses is the life of one household.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 9.1, then The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 9.0. A text whole and staged without break since 1891 wherever Western theatre is played; a construction in which every property is planted and paid and every exit timed; more than a century and a third of interpretation without a settled answer to why she does it; and one law that governs an aunt’s new hat and a shot under a portrait.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, family, money, class, scholarship and sexuality are held through one figure, and the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent or faint; what the play holds is one household. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.3, where elevation is the thing the play refuses its heroine, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, where myth is built and deliberately kept domestic. The grain of the Norwegian is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The work is held below the summit by its aggregate and by the Epochal Gate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, a play in four acts, written in Dano-Norwegian, the written Norwegian of 1890, published by Gyldendal in Copenhagen in December 1890 and first staged at the Residenztheater in Munich. It is scored as a text for performance: the surviving text Ibsen published, complete and unproblematic in transmission. No later version or adaptation is scored, and productions are evidence of the play’s life, none of them the work. Every axis, The Made included, is judged on Ibsen’s original. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The play is known scene by scene, with its properties, its seven characters and their relations, but not line by line, and no Norwegian is quoted; events and speeches are paraphrased, and references are by act. Translation · Michael Meyer’s version (1962), the nearer to playable speech, and William Archer and Edmund Gosse’s (1891), the nearer to the shape of Ibsen’s sentences, were used for sense. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged or credited to the play. The finer register of the Norwegian, beyond the contrast of Tesman’s fussy idiom and Hedda’s clipped one, is not heard here, and is neither credited nor charged. Names follow the usual English forms. Facts that could not be verified, among them the date of the first performance, the length of the text, the relative length of the acts, Ibsen’s reported words on Hedda as her father’s daughter, the reception of the first productions, the names of particular actresses and productions, and particular films, are not given.