Ibsen’s Kingdom: The Man and His Works
By Evert Sprinchorn
Yale University Press, 2021

Evert Sprinchorn is of course right to open his new book Ibsen’s Kingdom: The Man and His Works by reminding his readers of the towering stature of his subject. His “unchallenged father of modern drama” is “as readable as Dickens, as morally controversial as Tolstoy, as psychologically penetrating as Dostoyevsky, as inescapable as Wagner.” Even people who’ve never sat through an Ibsen play in person can recognize titles like A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler, whereas this isn’t true for things like Caesar and Cleopatra or Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, whose career overlapped with a chunk of Ibsen’s and who acts as an odd kind of bête noire at different points in Sprinchorn’s book. Ibsen is, as readers are told here, a household name. 

Sprinchorn’s book follows last year’s Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask by Ivo de Figueiredo (reviewed here), and both work in the shadow of Michael Meyer’s big, brilliant biography from 1971. This latest account deploys more quasi-military language (“He had conquered Scandinavia and was now conducting forays into Germany,” and so on) and places a welcome emphasis on the great man’s work rather than the great man. Sprinchorn is seldom challengingly original in his readings of the major plays (although he’s very good on the weird masterpiece Ghosts), but he’s always energetic and readable, as here on the climax of Hedda Gabler:

The painter’s eye and the psychologist’s insight are at work in the scene in which Brack exerts his power over Hedda. Talking of her fear of scandal, he leans on the back of the armchair at the right, while Hedda, sitting on the ottoman belonging to the chair, is conspicuously at his feet. But she is near the stove in which the demons dwell. When Brack bends over her and whispers his threats, she says, “I’d rather die.” The fact that the fire is out implies that she is no longer in the grip of her emotions, no longer détraquée. She is thinking clearly. Here the stage picture speaks more eloquently than the words because the properties, the chair, the stool, and the stove, have gradually been accumulating symbolic weight during the first three acts.

Of course, no biography of Ibsen, not even one as refreshingly literary as this one, can stray long from the Master himself, and so readers are regularly reminded, despite the fine mist of Sprinchorn’s evident sympathies, of what a colossally boring, shallow, stupid, mean, petty, vindictive grasping arriviste Ibsen was virtually from the first moment he could lord it over the skittering urchins of Skien. Sprinchorn relates the details of Ibsen’s relentless, grinding vanity with a vigor that’s always hoping they’re secret signifiers of something more noble, as when we get a glimpse of the young playwright assiduously shaping his wardrobe and even handwriting to the affluent renown that was his only life goal. “The careerist in him sought to secure his position,” Sprinchorn writes, with more military imagery, “calling in forces that lay exposed to attack and strengthening the bulwarks that had been hastily thrown up in the years of struggle.”  

But for an insecure man, all years are years of struggle, and there was scarcely a more insecure man than Ibsen in all of the 19th century. Time and again in Ibsen’s Kingdom, when Sprinchorn is compelled to shift his narrative from the flinty brilliance of the plays to the playwright himself, the same portrait surfaces, and it’s never an even remotely likable one:

Ibsen’s growing international renown meant more to him than the wealth that came with it. The humiliations he had endured because of his father’s business failure would never be completely banished from his thoughts, the mortification never forgotten. However old he grew, he was always quick to take offense at even the slightest slur on his reputation or social rank. It was never a joking matter with him.

Yes indeed, no joking matter, ever. That’s typically the price readers must pay for hunkering down with an Ibsen biography (not so, for instance, Shaw, who could regularly be a bucket of chuckles and was often happy to laugh at himself). But at least Ibsen’s Kingdom spends a wonderful amount of time with the imperishable works. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.