Theatre
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen · 1890
Synopsis
Hedda, daughter of the late General Gabler, who left her no fortune, returns to Christiania from a long honeymoon with Jørgen Tesman, a researcher who spent the journey working and is counting on a university chair; she was bored. Judge Brack tells Tesman of a rival for the post: Ejlert Løvborg, a former intimate of Hedda, a bohemian and drinker who has been sober for some years, author of a highly praised book and of a new manuscript of which only one copy exists.
Context
The play was written in Munich in 1890. Gyldendal published it on 16 December in Copenhagen and Christiania, in ten thousand copies, and the critics received it badly, judging its heroine enigmatic and incomprehensible. According to the Ibsen Centre of the University of Oslo, the publisher Heinemann bought the English rights for one hundred and fifty pounds and published Edmund Gosse's translation on 20 January 1891. The first performance took place at the Residenztheater in Munich on 31 January 1891, in the presence of the author. Ibsen wanted, by the title, to make clear that Hedda was more her father's daughter than her husband's wife.
Who it is for
A prose play in four acts, set in a single drawing room over less than two days; the heroine's motives are left to be deduced from her actions.
Prizes and reception
Poorly received when it appeared, it is now considered a classic of realism, and its title role a female Hamlet.