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    Little Eyolf
    Little Eyolf
    Little Eyolf
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    Little Eyolf

    By Henrik Ibsen

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    "Little Eyolf", is the story of its title character, a young boy who is paralyzed in one leg, and his family, the Allmers. At the outset of the play we find Eyolf's father Alfred returning from a trip in the mountains where he has decided to abandon work on his book and focus on raising his son. The tragic irony of this newly found yet seemingly empty devotion is exhibited when Eyolf disappears unnoticed with the Rat-Wife, a woman capable of enchanting rodents into following her into the sea. Written in 1894 and first performed the following year, "Little Eyolf" is one of Ibsen's classic and tragic dramas.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9781420915808
    Author

    Henrik Ibsen

    Born in 1828, Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and poet, often associated with the early Modernist movement in theatre. Determined to become a playwright from a young age, Ibsen began writing while working as an apprentice pharmacist to help support his family. Though his early plays were largely unsuccessful, Ibsen was able to take employment at a theatre where he worked as a writer, director, and producer. Ibsen’s first success came with Brand and Peter Gynt, and with later plays like A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and The Master Builder he became one of the most performed playwrights in the world, second only to William Shakespeare. Ibsen died in his home in Norway in 1906 at the age of 78.

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      Book preview

      Little Eyolf - Henrik Ibsen

      LITTLE EYOLF

      BY HENRIK IBSEN

      TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM ARCHER

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3079-5

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-1580-8

      This edition copyright © 2011

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      DRAMATIS PERSONAE

      ACT ONE

      ACT TWO

      ACT THREE

      LITTLE EYOLF

      INTRODUCTION

      Little Eyolf was written in Christiania during 1894, and published in Copenhagen on December 11 in that year. By this time Ibsen's correspondence has become so scanty as to afford us no clue to what may be called the biographical antecedents of the play. Even of anecdotic history very little attaches to it. For only one of the characters has a definite model been suggested. Ibsen himself told his French translator, Count Prozor, that the original of the Rat-Wife was a little old woman who came to kill rats at the school where he was educated. She carried a little dog in a bag, and it was said that children had been drowned through following her. This means that Ibsen did not himself adapt to his uses the legend so familiar to us in Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin, but found it ready adapted by the popular imagination of his native place, Skien. This idea, Ibsen continued to Count Prozor, "was just what I wanted for bringing about the disappearance of Little Eyolf, in whom the infatuation{1} and the feebleness of his father reproduced, but concentrated, exaggerated, as one often sees them in the son of such a father." Dr. Elias tells us that a well-known lady-artist, who in middle life suggested to him the figure of Lona Hessel, was in later years the model for the Rat-Wife. There is no inconsistency between these two accounts of the matter. The idea was doubtless suggested by his recollection of the rat-catcher of Skien, while traits of manner and physiognomy might be borrowed from the lady in question.

      The Literary Remains contain a first draft of Little Eyolf, with several gaps in it, and yet fairly complete. It shows once more how after having invented a play, the poet set about re-inventing it, and how the re-invention was apt to determine its poetic value. In this case he had extraordinary difficulty with the characters' names, which he changed about incessantly. His first list of characters ran thus:

      Harald Borgheim.

      Johanna, his wife.

      Rita, his sister.

      Alfred, his son, eleven years old.

      Eivind Almer, road-engineer.

      Miss Varg, Johanna's aunt.

      Miss Varg is the character who ultimately became the grimly-fascinating Rat-Wife. After he ceased to be Borgheim Allmers became Skioldheim. Eyolf, after beginning as Alfred was for some time Eivind. Rita was Andrea all through the second act. Not till the third act was reached had the names been finally allotted. It seems that the poet's first idea was simply to study a rather commonplace wife's jealousy of a rather commonplace child. The lameness of Eyolf was an afterthought; there is no trace of it in the draft. And as Eyolf is not lame, the terrible cry of the crutch is floating must also have been an afterthought, as well as the almost intolerable scene of recrimination between Allmers and Rita as to the accident which caused his lameness. In fact, nearly everything that gives the play its depth, its horror, and its elevation came as an afterthought. There is a slight—a very slight—hint of the evil eye motive, but the idea is in no way developed. Instead of the exquisite beauty of Rita's resolve to try to make her peace with the great open eyes, and to fill the blank within her with something that is a little like love, we have a page of almost common sentimentalizing over Eyolf's continued existence in their hearts. And instead of Alfred's wonderful tale of his meeting with Death in the mountains, we find a poem which he reads to Rita!—the verses Ibsen had written as a first hint for The Master Builder. In no case, perhaps, did Ibsen's revision work such a transfiguration as in this play.

      The verse quoted on pp. 52 and 53 is the last line of a very well-known poem by Johan Sebastian Welhaven, entitled Republikanerne, written in 1839. An unknown guest in a Paris restaurant has been challenged by a noisy party of young Frenchmen to join them in drinking a health to Poland. He refuses; they denounce him as a craven and a slave; he bares his breast and shows the scars of wounds received in fighting for the country whose lost cause has become a subject for conventional enthusiasm and windy rhetoric.

      "De saae pas hverandre. Han vandred sin vei.

      De havde champagne, men rörte den ei."

      They looked at each other. He went on his way. There stood their champagne, but they did not touch it. The champagne incident leads me to wonder whether the relation between Rita and Allmers may not have been partly suggested to Ibsen by the relation between Charlotte Stieglitz and her weakling of a husband. Their story must have been known to him through George Brandes's Young Germany, if not more directly. From time to time, says Dr. Brandes, there came over her what she calls her champagne-mood; she grieves that this is no longer the case with him.{2} Did the germ of the incident lie in these words?

      The first performance of the play in Norway took place at the Christiania Theatre on January 15, 1895, Fru Wettergren playing Rita And Fru Dybwad, Asta. In Copenhagen (March 13, 1895) Fru Oda Nielsen and Fru Hennings played Rita and Asta respectively, while Emil Poulsen played Allmers. The first German Rita (Deutsches Theater, Berlin, January 12, 1895) was Frau Agnes Sorma, with Reicher as Allmers. Six weeks later Frl. Sandrock played Rita at the Burgtheater, Vienna. In May 1895 the play was acted by M. Lugné-Poë's company in Paris. The first performance in English took place at the Avenue Theatre, London, on the afternoon of November 23, 1896, with Miss Janet Achurch as Rita, Miss Elizabeth Robins as Asta, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell as the Rat-Wife. Miss Achurch's Rita made a profound impression. Mrs. Patrick Campbell afterwards played the part in a short series of evening performances. In the spring of 1895 the play was acted in Chicago by a company of Scandinavian amateurs, presumably in Norwegian. Fru Oda Nielsen has recently (I understand) given some performances of it in New York, and Madame Alla Nazimova has announced it for production during the coming season (1907-1908).

      As the external history of Little Eyolf is so short. I am tempted to depart from my usual practice, and say a few words

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