Norwegian Wood
HENRIK IBSEN: THE MAN AND THE MASK
By Ivo de Figueiredo, translated by Robert Ferguson.
Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2019.
704 pp., $40 cloth.
HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND HENRIK IBSEN? Theatrically, he was the Master Builder himself, setting the pattern and standard for more than a century of contemporary drama. Playwrights since Aeschylus have used the theatre to ask social questions, but Ibsen was the one who perfected the delivery system for bourgeois audiences—the ones, for better or worse, who became the theatre’s backbone. Ibsen’s recipe involves a mix of middle-class family crisis and a widely applicable moral dialectic; the schaden-freude and melodrama of the first element sweetens the virtue and difficulty of the second. That structure has worked in one way or another for nearly every realistic playwright you can name since.
When Ibsen started writing, Norway was enough of a cultural backwater that there weren’t even many plays written in Norwegian; serious writers wrote in Danish, until Norwegian nationalism made language an urgent issue. Ibsen rose from obscurity—he was a failed student, a penniless poet,?
