After a long break due to extreme business caused by both my thesis, holidays and also the excitement of presenting a paper on an aspect of my thesis in Honolulu at the 2015 NAVSA conference, I bring you my return blog which is my paper for NAVSA convenir toy touching on the theory and history of adaptation as well as mainly looking Henrik Ibsen's influence on the London stage.
Victorians in the World - Ibsen and the London theatre
Reflections of Ibsen’s Realism on the Victorian Stage
Ibsen got everywhere. He really was in everyone’s hair by the end of the nineteenth-century. He is known today as the father of realism. And this paper analyses the significant impact of realism as a dramatic genre on the Victorian stage as a consequence of his work. My PhD examines nineteenth-century stage adaptations of three nineteenth-century novels; Jane Eyre, East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret. My study of these often ignored stage adaptations has revealed that they provide a wealth of information about how real people, not critics and other authors, responded to some of the most controversial and taboo literary characters. The plays have been ignored because some academics have dismissed them as ephemeral, or considered them as popular theatre and therefore lacking in literary significance. However, the changes that the dramatists made when approaching the transformation of these characters reveal a lot about the issues that affected people at the time and what they liked or disliked about these characters. The adaptations also reveal important cultural changes, and most importantly to this paper the impact of new theatrical styles.
A change in attitudes towards these rejected plays is happening, albeit very slowly. Patsy Stoneman’s, for me revolutionary, book Jane Eyre on Stage: 1848-1898 revealed the potential that these plays provide. And she has opened these adaptations up to the world by publishing them in her kind of anthology providing additional staging and contextual information.
one of the most obvious changes I noticed whilst conducting my research was the dramatic change in style as the century approached its conclusion, or shall we say it's final curtain? I attribute this change in theatrical taste to Ibsen’s enormous popularity.
In this paper I will demonstrate how the fashion for Ibsen’s realism changed the meaning of some of the most contentious and sensational characters in nineteenth-century literature. This paper explores not just the impact of Ibsen’s work on the stage adaptations of Jane Eyre, East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret but also on other dramatists, like George Bernard Shaw, to the present time. I will first look at Ibsen’s realism as an influence on the stage adaptations examined during my PhD thesis before moving on to an examination of Shaw and twentieth- and twenty-first century playwrights.
On analysis, it is possible to see the effect of Ibsen’s work on the nineteenth-century stage adaptations of all of the novels I studied. The most obvious is W.G. Wills’ 1882 stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, which I'm devoting a significant chunk of the time here to examining. It has a significantly different dramatic style compared to the other nineteenth-century adaptations of Jane Eyre. It is important to state at this point that all of the novel-to-stage adaptations I examined are clear examples of the theatrical genre of melodrama. But Wills’ play develops the characters rather than having stock villains and heroines and he forefronts Jane’s passage to maturity over the usual comedic business and slapstick that were features of the majority of the earlier adaptations. As such Wills’ Jane does not provoke the audience’s sympathy for her situation as either an orphan nor a woman alone in a prejudiced patriarchal society. The other stage adaptations of Jane Eyre make frequent attempts to garner the audience’s sympathy for Jane, by alternately making her beautiful and pretty, rather than pitiful plain Jane from the original novel, and having other poorer servant characters describing their pity for her. As such Wills’ presents a Jane who is viewed as a very vocal messenger for female rights and human rights on a wider scale but the manner in which this is done implies that it might not be a good thing.This could however be a subversion of the argument. Whatever your opinion on this, it is evident that the play discusses ‘real life’ social issues.
With Wills’ I also noticed some similarities to Ibsen’s Ghosts, one of Ibsen’s most popular plays. Appearing in 1881, it is another pointed commentary on the skewed morality of society. In it a widow, Helene Alving, reveals that she has kept hidden all of the negative aspects of her marriage, primarily the philandering of her late husband, Captain Alving, to her pastor. In Wills’ adaptation of Jane Eyre, Jane has the support of the clergyman Mr Prior who is both locum parentis and stand in St John Rivers. She is the least vulnerable of all of the portrayals of Jane, with people constantly offering support and advice, or even their homes. Despite this Jane ignores Mr Prior’s advice to leave Rochester whereas Helene accepted the pastor’s advice to marry Captain Alving in order to reform him. She confesses her husband’s lifelong vices when she is in the process of dedicating an orphanage to the memory of her late husband. An act she is doing in order to spend all of her late husband’s money so that their son does not inherit anything from him, even money. Here, as with Wills’ Jane, is a clear example of a woman taking control of her own destiny, and also her son’s as she refuses to allow him to inherit anything from his father. The play was shocking because of its very public mention of venereal disease and also it's depiction of how accepted male behaviour was destroying families. So much so that the play achieved only a single private London performance on 13 March 1891 at the Royalty Theatre.
The issue of Lord Chamberlain's Office censorship, because of the subject matter of illegitimate children and sexually transmitted disease, was avoided by the formation of a subscription-only Independent Theatre Society to produce the play. Its members included playwright George Bernard Shaw and authors Thomas Hardy and Henry James.
The play also touches on incest as Oswald is beginning to fall in love with his mother’s maid, who is his father’s illegitimate daughter. Ghosts makes a strong criticism of male philandering directly in the play given the physical evidence of Captain Alving’s sins in the shape of syphilitic Oswald and in Wills’ Jane Eyre the criticism of male philandering is also very obvious as Jane is warned on frequent occasions to leave Rochester’s home and employ. Mrs Fairfax even tells her after Rochester’s wife’s death that she is in just as much danger even now from Rochester. Jane refuses to listen to all the advice that she is given in the play, even female advice warning her about Rochester:
Jane: Lady Ingram468 – I see your mistake469 – I can explain it 470– I’ve learnt from Mrs Fairfax’s own lips 471– there is a poor patient 472– a half sister473 –
Lady Ingram: Mrs Fairfax has been deceived among the rest57.
Jane (surely): You have made a monstrous charge474. What’s your evidence475?
Blanche: Give me that letter, Mama136.
Blanche: This patient, as you call it, has a brother 137– the news reached him of my engagement and he considerately wrote to me to tell me of the state of the case138. Should you like to read it139?
Lady Ingram: The first few lines will explain all58. (Jane snatches letter and staggers toward window.) Most suspicious agitation59.
Blanche: Why should we concern ourselves any farther about her, Mama140?
Mary: Poor thing31! Poor thing32!
Jane (returning): What is this letter476? Who is this Mr Mason477! I’d sooner believe a word from Mr Rochester’s lips than the cry of a whole slanderous world478. I don’t believe479 – (tears letter in two) some lying enemy480.
Here Jane is not just dismissing the female sisterhood but she is also rebelling against the social hierarchy by refusing to submit to the will of Lady Ingram and Blanche; her social superiors. Wills’ Jane is a very strong independent woman shaping her own destiny. She tears the evidence up and does exactly what she wants after confronting Rochester personally. Wills’ has taken Bronte’s original rebellious Jane and pushed her to an extreme. Despite the sensation of the very dramatic Jane, the play remains firmly realistic because of the change in dramatic style and because of the reasoning process that Jane goes through as she makes up her mind to leave Rochester. Gone are the earlier scenes of comic business, slapstick and fight scenes against vicious moustachioed villains. The focus is purely on Jane’s Bildungsroman reimagined on the stage.
The path to find one’s own destiny is a key theme in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, published in 1890. Hedda, the lead character is considered to be one of greatest dramatic roles of the nineteenth-century. The play is sometimes considered an analysis of mental illness and we now know that Ibsen was interested in the then-embryonic science of mental illness. Coincidentally Sigmund Freud’s first work on psychoanalysis appeared roughly a decade later. The critic Bernard Paris interprets Gabler's actions as stemming from her "need for freedom [which is] as compensatory as her craving for power... her desire to shape a man's destiny” ( Paris 1997: 59). Examples of mentally ill nineteenth-century women included what we now see as oppressed, but mentally normal, wilful characters, such as Lady Audley or Jane Eyre; women reacting to abuse, sexual or otherwise or sexually expressive women like Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason and East Lynne’s Lady Isabel Vane, as well as those with brain disease. Ibsen poured all of the permeating images of female madness into this one character. Most obvious is Hedda’s desire for freedom and it is interesting that Hedda's married name is Hedda Tesman and Gabler her maiden name. On the subject of the title, Ibsen wrote: "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife” (Sanders 2006). So whilst Ibsen denied making a conscious alignment with women’s rights when writing A Doll’s House during his speech for the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights in 1898, at this point he seemed happy to support a woman’s decision to find her own identity and not to be defined by that of her husband’s.
Evidently Ibsen’s work had a far reaching impact on Victorian drama, influencing productions appearing in even minor theatres. All of the adaptations I examine were produced in a minor theatre, i.e., those theatre houses, which lay on the fringes of civilised society and were largely on the wrong side of the River Thames. That even they were influenced by Ibsen is remarkable. These were theatres where polite society would not, on the whole, be caught dead and yet it is precisely because they existed outside respectable, high class society that they were able to find influence in Ibsen’s work. The very territory of melodrama opens up a space for experimentation because they require high drama, suspense, emotion, villains, heroines and slapstick. This is why so many of the melodramas performed in the nineteenth-century were adaptations. The dramatists and theatre managers were able to grab hold of an already popular novel especially those already containing some of those aforementioned elements, knowing that interested parties, lovers, or even despisers, of the book would come to see it. The dramatists then ran with it. The goal of getting as many bums on seats over the run as possible. And nothing was off limits as they “adapted” the novel. They experimented with characters, structure and plot to varying degrees. Sometimes the final adaptation was nothing like the original source. And sometimes the adaptation was so popular that the changes which were made became intrinsically linked with the original source forever more. Such as T. A. Palmer’s 1874 East Lynne where the invented line of ‘Dead… and never called me mother!’ comes from. This is a heart wrenching phrase which never actually appears in the original.
In respect of Jane Eyre, which had attracted so much interest on its publication due to its controversial rebellious heroine, this probably explains why the book is now a cultural phenomenon. The Lord Chamberlain’s Archives at the British Museum reveal that eight adaptations were registered between 1848-1898. We will never know how many illegal productions appeared as they were never submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. As the book already contained so many melodramatic elements because of its link to Gothic and sensational literature, it was ripe for transformation to the stage. And transform it, they did. The first adaptation to appear in 1848 by John Courtney creates not just an entirely different plot but also invents several new characters, i.e., the amusingly named Betty Bunce and Sally Suds. Courtney’s theatre, The Royal Victoria Theatre, London was in a poorer area where many of the local inhabitants were employed as servants as the census shows so of course these invented characters were servants too. Given that these dramatists felt comfortable enough to create entirely new characters who compete heavily with Jane for the audience’s attention, it is no wonder that Ibsen influence can be seen on the minor theatres towards the end of the century because of his popularity.
It would have been yet another way to appeal to the audience who were growing tired of seeing the same silly slapstick, comedic business and two dimensional characters. Whilst Ibsen’s realism had an impact on the style of the shows appearing at the theatres, there was a limit to his influence. The plays being performed by the end of the century should not technically be categorised as melodrama as the style had changed so much, but some melodramatic elements refused to be shaken off like long pathos filled soliloquies. Melodrama is defined by its focus on sensation, emotion and providing entertainment. Realism is concerned with reflecting real life and depicting real social conflicts, it has to be believable. Maybe this limit in Ibsen’s influence was because the poor Victorian audiences were desperate for relief and entertainment as an escape from the already grim reality of their day-to-day lives? The harsh reality of the full Ibsen style may have been just too much frustration, depression and sadness for them to cope with on top of their own emotional baggage.
It is also possible to see Ibsen’s desire to reflect ‘real life’ and social issues as an influence on the Victorian stage adaptations of East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret. John Dicks’ 1879 stage adaptation of East Lynne focuses more on the feelings of the middle-class Barbara Hare as she navigates her clandestine love of Archibald Carlyle and her brother Richard’s quest to clear his name of a murder charge than on Lady Isabel’s sensational story. Barbara not only opens the play with a monologue but has more soliloquies and asides than Lady Isabel in this version. And in John Brougham’s adaptation of Lady Audley’s Secret from 1866, Lady Audley is shown being pushed to the edge by a restrictive patriarchal society as she is not given the much needed support she requires as an abandoned wife with a child to feed. And this is the message that he ultimately presents. He also indicates that Lady Audley may well have committed bad acts, but ultimately she was not a bad woman and he lays the blame of Lady Audley’s ‘madness’ firmly at our feet by having Lady Audley accuse everyone gathered around her in the play’s climax for goading her to ‘madness’. You can imagine her not just pointing at the characters gathered around her but at the audience too. For Brougham, crucially it was that Lady Audley tried to escape the restrictions imposed on her by a cruel, patriarchal society that made her ‘mad’ in the eyes of society. Or more succinctly, she was mad because she refused to conform.
Henrik Ibsen is arguably the most important playwright of the last five hundred years. He ranks alongside William Shakespeare in terms of the influence of his work and renown. He was born in 1828 to a wealthy, well-respected merchant family who could trace their roots to all of the local patrician families in Skien, a small port town. Ibsen’s upbringing had an enormous impact on his plays as they largely reflect the concerns of the urban middle to upper-classes in the nineteenth-century. Even the very subject matters of Ibsen’s work marked a change from the theatre that had dominated the stages in the centuries past. Ibsen’s plays, like Bertholt Brecht’s in the century to come, had a clear social message commenting on the events of the day. For example, one of Ibsen’s most well known plays, A Doll’s House 1879, criticises the accepted marital roles for men and women. It was considered extremely controversial due to the play’s finale where the protagonist Nora leaves her husband and children because she wants to discover herself. Strangely, despite Ibsen confirming that he was inspired by the belief that “a woman cannot be herself in modern society” as it is “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint” (Meyer 1967: 467), he gave a speech at the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights in 1898, confessing that he “must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women’s rights movement,” as he wrote “without any conscious thought of making propaganda”. He stated that rather his task was “the description of humanity” (Dukore 1974: 563).
We turn now to look at Ibsen’s influence on other nineteenth-century playwrights as well as twentieth-century playwrights.
Over his career, Ibsen entirely redefined the rules of drama with a notion of realism that was adopted by Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw and Bertholt Brecht, to name just a few and which we can see in the theatre to this very day. One of the greatest changes is that since Ibsen’s heyday, the challenging of commonly accepted assumptions and speaking directly about ‘unsayable’, taboo issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play ART rather than merely entertainment.
A discussion of Ibsen’s influence on contemporary dramatists writing in London during the period would not be complete without reference to the greatly respected playwright, George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was greatly affected by Ibsen and some of his most famous plays, Mrs Warren’s Profession, Widowers’ Houses, Arms and the Man, all deal with very delicate social matters. Interest in and praise for Shaw’s work continues today with a production of Shaw’s Man and Superman having just finished its run starring Ralph Fiennes at the National Theatre. Man and Superman is an interesting mix of realism and surrealism with the often waylaid ‘Don Juan in hell’ scene suggesting that it does not have such a firm footing in the realism genre however it has a clear socio-political message regarding the purpose of life; contemplation. There are some other more striking similarities between Shaw and Ibsen particularly when you examine the leading characters’ motivations in Hedda Gabler and Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. Hedda is not afraid to do exactly what she wants to get what she wants and Mrs Warren is very much the same. Mrs Warren exploits the patriarchal society’s reliance on prostitutes to her own ends, making a fortune and raising her social position dramatically, although realistically she will always remain on the fringes due to the aspersions that her connection with prostitution has on her moral countenance. The difference between the two writers is that Shaw’s work seems to promote female independence and entrepreneurship suggesting a proto-feminist stance, however we know that Ibsen did not consciously align himself with the feminist cause as he pointed that out at the Women’s Rights Association meeting! You’d think that a place where you had been invited to speak about women’s rights would surely be entirely the wrong place to even hint that you’re not as much of an advocate as people had assumed! So maybe Ibsen was not as forward thinking regarding women’s rights as we assume. So with that in mind if we look again at Hedda Gabler and Ibsen’s comment that he wanted to identify her as her father’s daughter not as her husband’s wife. Is that good? Is that better than being identified as your husband’s wife? Isn't being owned by your father the same as being owned by your husband? Ibsen later presented a woman who truly sets out to define her own identity in A Doll’s House with Nora leaving her husband and children and slamming the door on her past life not knowing what her future holds but knowing that she will shape it by herself. In the case of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s seemingly political stance on women’s rights was an accident; however Shaw deliberately aligned himself with politics. Even Shaw’s wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, was a lifelong advocate for women’s education. donating £1000 to the London School of Economics for the endowment of a woman’s scholarship.
Ibsen’s impact was far wider reaching than the Victorian stage in London, he was also a massive influence on Bertholt Brecht as we can see from Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Threepenny Opera, all of which have serious socio-political messages. In Russia, the father of modern acting Konstantin Stanislavsky used the techniques of realism and naturalism to lay down a new style of acting which was then a key influence on Arthur Miller in America. It is well known that the story for All My Sons was inspired by Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. And then to 1950s Britain, there’s John Osborne with his angry young man in Look Back in Anger. .
In conclusion, Ibsen is still influencing drama today. His plays are still being performed all over the world and in 2006, the centennial of Ibsen’s death, A Doll’s House was the most performed play of the year. Additionally UNESCO inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value. Modern emerging playwrights continue to be inspired by Ibsen. One of The RSC’s leading lights Tom Morton-Smith who wrote the box office buster Oppenheimer which premiered this Easter has clearly been influenced by Ibsen as he shows the tension surrounding Robert Oppenheimer in the build up to the invention of the atomic bomb and how he dealt with the after effects of the guilt weighing heavily on his conscience.
In Britain, we’re currently experiencing a George Bernard Shaw revival. My local theatre has put on a number of Shaw plays this year with Mrs Warren’s Profession finishing last week there so maybe we’ll have an Ibsen revival next year, or the year after.
Bibliography
Cunningham, Lawrence S.; Reich, John J. (2009). Culture & Values, Volume II: A Survey of the Humanities with Readings. Cengage Learning. p. 492.
Dukore, Bernard F., ed. 1974. Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. Florence, KY: Heinle & Heinle.
Meyer, Michael. 1967. Ibsen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
Paris, Bernard. Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature, New York University Press: New York City, 1997, p. 59.
Sanders, Tracy (2006). "Lecture Notes: Hedda Gabler — Fiend or Heroine". Australian Catholic University. Retrieved 2008-10-05.
Showalter, Elaine, ‘Feminine Heroines’ in Bloom, Harold, The Victorian Novel (New York: Chelsea House, 2004).
