Hedda Gabler () is a play written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The world premiere was staged on 31 January 1891 at the Residenztheater in Munich. Ibsen himself was in attendance, although he remained back-stage.Meyer, Michael Leverson, editor and introduction. Ibsen, Henrik. The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler. W. W. Norton & Company (1997) . page 7. Though initial reviews were negative, it has since been canonized as a masterpiece of literary realism, 19th-century theatre, and world drama in general.Bunin, Ivan. About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony. Northwestern University Press (2007) . page 26Checkhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. Editor: Karlinsky, Simon. Northwestern University Press (1973) page 385Haugen, Einer Ingvald. Ibsen's Drama: Author to Audience. University of Minnesota Press (1979) . page 142
Hedda Gabler dramatizes the experiences of the title character, Hedda, the daughter of a general, who is trapped in a marriage and a house that she does not want. Hedda is considered one of the great dramatic roles in theatre, and has been described as a female variation of Hamlet.
Hedda's married name is Hedda Tesman; Gabler is 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."
Characters Hedda Tesman (née Gabler) — The main character, newly married and bored with both her marriage and life, seeks to influence a human fate for the first time. She is the daughter of General Gabler. She wants luxury and amusement but has no funds. George (Jørgen) Tesman — Hedda's husband, an academic who is as interested in research and travel as he is enamoured with his wife, although blind to Hedda's manipulative ways. Despite George's presumed rivalry with Eilert over Hedda, he remains a congenial and compassionate host and even plans to return Eilert's manuscript after Eilert loses it while drunk. Juliana (Juliane) Tesman — George's loving aunt who has raised him since early childhood. She is also called Aunt Julle in the play, and Aunt Ju-Ju by George. Desperately wants Hedda and her nephew to have a child. In an earlier draft, Ibsen named her Mariane Rising, clearly after his aunt (father's younger half-sister) and godmother Mariane Paus who grew up (with Ibsen's father) on the stately farm Rising near Skien; while she was later renamed Juliane Tesman, her character was modeled after Mariane Paus.Oskar Mosfjeld, Henrik Ibsen og Skien: En biografisk og litteratur-psykologisk studie (p. 236), Oslo, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1949 Thea Elvsted — A younger schoolmate of Hedda and a former acquaintance of George. Nervous and shy, Thea is in an unhappy marriage. Judge Brack — An unscrupulous family friend. It is implied that the Judge has a lascivious personality, which he directs towards Hedda. Eilert Lövborg (Ejlert Løvborg) — George's former colleague, who now competes with George to achieve publication and a Professorship. Eilert was once in love with Hedda. Destroyed his reputation in society by spending his money on a lifestyle of depravity. Bertha (Berte) — A servant of the Tesmans. Wants to please Hedda at all times.
Plot
Hedda, the daughter of a general, has just returned to her villa in Kristiania (now Oslo) from her honeymoon. Her husband is George Tesman, a young, aspiring, and serious academic who continued his research during their honeymoon. It becomes clear in the course of the play that she never loved him, but married him probably because she thinks her years of youthful abandon are over.
The reappearance of George's academic rival, Eilert Løvborg, throws their lives into disarray. Eilert, a writer, is a recovering alcoholic who has wasted his talent until now. Thanks to a relationship with Hedda's old schoolmate, Thea Elvsted (who is in the process of leaving her husband for him), Eilert is showing signs of rehabilitation (for example refusing alcohol) and has just published a bestseller in the same field as George's. When Hedda and Eilert talk privately together, it becomes apparent that they are former lovers.
The critical success of his recently published work makes Eilert a threat to George, as Eilert is now a competitor for the university professorship George had been hoping for and anticipating. George and Hedda are financially overstretched, and George tells Hedda that he will not be able to finance the regular entertaining or luxurious housekeeping that she had been expecting. Upon meeting Eilert, however, the couple discovers that he has no intention of competing for the professorship, but rather has spent the last few years working on what he considers to be his masterpiece, the "sequel" to his recently published work.
Apparently jealous of Thea's influence over Eilert, Hedda hopes to come between them. Despite his previous drinking problem, she encourages Eilert to accompany George and his associate, Judge Brack, to a party, which promises to be raucous. George returns home from the party at dawn the following day and reveals that he found the manuscript (the only copy) of Eilert's great new work, which the latter lost while drunk. George is then called away to his aunt's house, leaving the manuscript in Hedda's possession. When Eilert next sees Hedda and Thea, he tells them that he has lost the manuscript. Thea is horrified, and it is revealed that she had considerable influence in its development. Hedda says nothing to contradict Eilert or to reassure Thea. After Thea has left, Hedda encourages Eilert to commit suicide, giving him a pistol that had belonged to her father. She then burns the manuscript and tells George she has destroyed it to secure their future. George is momentarily horrified.
Almost immediately the news comes that Eilert has killed himself after the party, and George and Thea are determined to try to reconstruct his unpublished new book from Eilert's notes, which Thea has kept. Hedda is shocked to discover from Judge Brack that Eilert's death, apparently in a brothel, was messy and probably accidental; this "ridiculous and vile" death contrasts with the "beautiful and free" one that Hedda had imagined for him (and asked him to ensure). Worse, Brack knows the origins of the pistol. He tells Hedda that if he reveals what he knows, a scandal will likely arise around her. Hedda realises that this places Brack in a position of continuous power over her, which he implies he will use to coerce her, possibly into a sexual relationship. Leaving the others, she goes into her smaller room and then shoots herself in the head with her other pistol. The others in the room assume that Hedda is simply firing shots, and they follow the sound to investigate. The play ends with George, Brack and Thea discovering her body.
Critical interpretation Joseph Wood Krutch makes a connection between Hedda Gabler and Freud, whose first work on psychoanalysis was published almost a decade later. In Krutch's analysis, Gabler is one of the first fully developed neurotic female protagonists of literature. By that, Krutch means that Hedda is neither logical nor is she insane in the old sense of being random and unaccountable. Her aims and her motives have a secret personal logic of their own. She gets what she wants, but what she wants is not anything that normal people would acknowledge (at least, not publicly) to be desirable. One of the significant things that such a character implies is the premise that there is a secret, sometimes unconscious, world of aims and methods — one might almost say a secret system of values — that is often much more important than the rational one. It is regarded as a deep and emotional play, due to Ibsen's portrayal of an anti-heroine.
Ibsen was interested in the then-embryonic science of mental illness which the world had a poor understanding of by present-day standards. His play Ghosts is another example of this. Examples of the troubled 19th-century female might include oppressed, but "normal", willful, characters; women in abusive or loveless relationships; and those with some type of organic brain disease. Ibsen is content to leave such explanations unsettled. 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, Bernard. Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature, New York University Press: New York City, 1997, p. 59.
Productions The play was performed in Munich at the Königliches Residenz-Theater on 31 January 1891, with Clara Heese as Hedda, though Ibsen was said to be displeased with the declamatory style of her performance. Ibsen's work had an international following so that translations and productions in various countries appeared very soon after the publication in Copenhagen and the premiere in Munich. In February 1891 there were productions in Berlin and Copenhagen.Marker, Frederick J. Marker, Lise-Lone. Ibsen's Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays. Cambridge University Press (1989). Meyer, Michael Leverson, editor and introduction. Ibsen, Henrik. The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler. W. W. Norton & Company (1997) . page 139. On 20 April 1891, the first British performance of the play occurred, at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, starring Elizabeth Robins, who directed it with Marion Lea, who played Thea. Robins also played Hedda in the first US production, which opened on 30 March 1898 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York City. In February 1899 it was produced as part of The Moscow Art Theatre's first season with Maria F. Andreeva as Hedda.Worrall, Nick. The Moscow Art Theatre. Routledge (2003) page 82.
A 1902 production starring Minnie Maddern Fiske was a major sensation on Broadway, and following its initial limited run was revived with the same actress the next year.
Many prominent actresses have played the role of Hedda, including Vera Komissarzhevskaya, Eleonora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Asta Nielsen, Johanne Louise Schmidt, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Eva Le Gallienne, Elizabeth Robins, Anne Meacham, Ingrid Bergman, Peggy Ashcroft, Fenella Fielding, Jill Bennett, Janet Suzman, Diana Rigg, Glenda Jackson, Isabelle Huppert, Claire Bloom, June Brown, Kate Burton, Geraldine James, Kate Mulgrew, Kelly McGillis, Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, Jane Fonda, Annette Bening, Amanda Donohoe, Judy Davis, Emmanuelle Seigner, Mary-Louise Parker, Harriet Walter, Rosamund Pike, Ruth Wilson, Cate Blanchett and Katie Holmes.
In 1970 the Royal National Theatre in London staged a production of the play directed by Ingmar Bergman, starring Maggie Smith, who gained much critical acclaim and won a Best Actress Evening Standard Theatre Award for her performance. Also in the early 1970s, Irene Worth played Hedda at Stratford, Ontario, prompting New York Times critic Walter Kerr to write, "Miss Worth is just possibly the best actress in the world."
A 1973/4 Royal Shakespeare Company world tour of the play was directed and translated by Trevor Nunn, and starred Pam St Clement as Bertha, Patrick Stewart as Eilert Lovborg, Peter Eyre as George Tesman, Glenda Jackson as Hedda Tesman, Timothy West as Judge Brack, Constance Chapman as Juliana Tesman, and Jennie Linden as Mrs. Elvsted.