Henrik Ibsen, one of history’s finest playwrights, released Hedda Gabler, one of his finest plays, at the height of his fame in 1890. Originally published in a Dano-Norwegian hybrid language spoken by the Norwegian elite of Ibsen’s time, the play has since been translated into a multitude of languages and performed around the world. In 2006, the hundredth anniversary of Ibsen’s death, 91 countries took part in celebrating the famous playwright. 

Hedda Gabler is a drama in four acts that takes place in the late 19th-century high society of Christiania (Oslo), Norway. Hedda and her husband, the scholarly George Tesman, have just returned from an extended, loveless, honeymoon through continental Europe. George vies for a professorship while Hedda spends her days in a monotonous pattern of receiving visitors and playing parlor music on her piano; only her father’s pistols bring her joy. Eilert Lovborg, a respected writer, appears with a promising new manuscript that threatens George’s professional career, as he is George’s opponent for the professorship—and Hedda’s former lover. Hedda can’t help but take up Eilert’s strings once again, driving a wedge between him and his new companion, Mrs. Elvsted. When Eilert’s manuscript goes missing and ends up in Hedda’s hands, she makes a desperate decision to preserve herself and her husband, permanently upsetting the lives of everyone she knows—including herself. 

Ibsen’s steadfast statement in titling his play Hedda Gabler (presenting Hedda by her father’s name, and not her husband’s) reminds the audience that she is still a general’s daughter who has a soldier’s pride, and not her husband’s wife who easily fits into the role of housewife. Much has been written on Hedda’s tempestuous personality: contemporary reviews say that she is “selfish, morbid, bitter, and cruel,” with an “overmastering desire to destroy,” while modern opinion sees her as a woman who “has a taste for liberty, beauty and strength.” Hedda’s problem, therefore, is that she chafes for a life beyond being a wife and mother in an era where a high-class woman could be nothing else. 

To this day, Hedda Gabler still fascinates audiences. As a realistic portrayal of shifting human relationships and a deep psychological dive into the mind of a woman of insatiable vanity and excessive individuality, Henrik Ibsen’s impact on realism in theatre with Hedda Gabler cannot be understated. As the New York Times wrote in 1898: “Rightly understood, no drama could be clearer, more logical, more absorbingly interesting than Hedda Gabler.”

Needed?

By 1890, Norway was still heavily influenced by its long history of Danish rule, indicated by the dominant language, Bokmål, and absence of a native monarchy. Intellectualism was highly regarded and a so-called “civil servant state” formed a parliament overseen by Swedish authority, as Norway only gained full independence in 1905.