The Project Gutenberg eBook, Love's Comedy, by Henrik Ibsen, Translated by
C. H. Herford

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Title: Love's Comedy

Author: Henrik Ibsen

Release Date: June 22, 2006 [eBook #18657]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE'S COMEDY***

E-text prepared by Douglas Levy

The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume I

LOVE'S COMEDY

Translation by C. H. Herford

INTRODUCTION*

_Koerlighedens Komedie_ was published at Christiania in 1862. The
polite world--so far as such a thing existed at the time in the
Northern capital--received it with an outburst of indignation
now entirely easy to understand. It has indeed faults enough.
The character-drawing is often crude, the action, though full of
effective by-play, extremely slight, and the sensational climax
has little relation to human nature as exhibited in Norway, or
out of it, at that or any other time. But the sting lay in the
unflattering veracity of the piece as a whole; in the merciless
portrayal of the trivialities of persons, or classes, high in their
own esteem; in the unexampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman
upon the stage. All these have long since passed in Scandinavia,
into the category of the things which people take with their Ibsen
as a matter of course, and the play is welcomed with delight by
every Scandinavian audience. But in 1862 the matter was serious,
and Ibsen meant it to be so.

For they were years of ferment--those six or seven which intervened
between his return to Christiania from Bergen in 1857, and his
departure for Italy in 1864. As director of the newly founded
"Norwegian Theatre," Ibsen was a prominent member of the little
knot of brilliant young writers who led the nationalist revolt
against Danish literary tradition, then still dominant in
well-to-do, and especially in official Christiania. Well-to-do
and official Christiania met the revolt with contempt. Under such
conditions, the specific literary battle of the Norwegian with
the Dane easily developed into the eternal warfare of youthful
idealism with "respectability" and convention. Ibsen had already
started