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Henrik Ibsen and Bernard Shaw never met. A meeting would have been possible in 1890 when Ibsen was living in Munich and Shaw passed through on his way to the Passion Play at Oberammergau. Shaw explained later to William Archer, the friend who had five years earlier introduced him to Ibsen's work, that "my total ignorance of Norwegian prevented my calling on him." They might have conversed in German, of which Shaw presumably had some and Ibsen a lot, but perhaps Shaw felt that he couldn't present himself adequately in a second language. In any case, the old giant and the younger one never encountered each another.
In person. On paper Shaw had already embraced Ibsen in the lecture that became The Quintessence of Ibsenism, the first book in English on the subject, a study that through its insights and its partialities opened paths for the critics who followed. Shaw's subsequent writings on Ibsen, both when he was a theater critic and after he himself had become a world-- rank dramatist, confirmed what he had learned from the senior man.
Recently the two dramatists were again juxtaposed for me by a production of A Doll House. (That is the correct title, says the preeminent Ibsen translator Rolf Fjelde-grammatically and ideationally.) This production reminded me of, underscored, the comparable views of the two dramatists on a curious but revelatory point: their attitudes toward conventional nineteenth-century dramaturgy.
The hoariest critical commonplace about A Doll House is that, until the great final scene, the play is a creakily contrived, nineteenth-century piece du theatre. The first critic to point out this creakiness, and to scoff at those who were put off by it, was Shaw in The Quintessence. Up to a point, wrote Shaw, this is "a play that might be turned into a very ordinary French drama by the excision of a few lines and the substitution of a sentimental happy ending for the famous last scene." But, says Shaw, it was that last scene through which the play "conquered Europe and founded a new school of dramatic art."
To understand why the iconoclastic Ibsen wrote two and twothirds of this play like "very ordinary French drama," look at his earlier theater life. In 1849, at the age...