Abstract

Peer Gynt, five act verse play, published in Norwegian in 1867

and produced in 1876. The title character, based on a legendary
Norwegian folk hero, is a rouge who will be destroyed unless he is
saved by the love of a woman. This play by Henrik Ibsen who is a
Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As on of the founders
of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as “ the father
of realism “ and one of the most influential playwrights of his time.
His play Peer Gynt considered as on of his major work .

The study aims to revive the romanticism in the modern drama, it

argues that the romantic hero of Peer Gynt has the elements of
the Byronic hero. This study is divided into two sections and
conclusion, section one is introductory and section two is the
elaboration. The conclusion sums up the finding of the study.

Section one

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway. In 1862, he
was exiled to Italy, where he wrote the tragedy Brand. In 1868, Ibsen
moved to Germany, where he wrote one of his most famous works: the
play A Doll's House. In 1890, he wrote Hedda Gabler, creating one of
theater's most notorious characters. By 1891, Ibsen had returned to
Norway a literary hero. He died on May 23, 1906, in Oslo, Norway.
As a child, Ibsen showed little sign of the theatrical genius he would
become. He grew up in the small Norwegian coastal town of Skien as
the oldest of five children born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen. His father
was a successful merchant and his mother painted, played the piano
and loved to go to the theater. Ibsen himself expressed an interest in
becoming an artist as well. At 15, Ibsen stopped school and went to
work. He landed a position as an apprentice in an apothecary in
Grimstad. Ibsen worked there for six years, using his limited free time
to write poetry and paint. In 1849, he wrote his first play Catilina, a
drama written in verse modeled after one of his great influences,
William Shakespeare.
The following year, Ibsen had a fateful encounter with violinist and
theater manager Ole Bull. Bull liked Ibsen and offered him a job as a
writer and manager for the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. The position
proved to be an intense tutorial in all things theatrical and even
included traveling abroad to learn more about his craft. In 1857, Ibsen
returned to Christiania to run another theater there. This proved to be
a frustrating venture for him, with others claiming that he mismanaged
the theater and calling for his ouster. Despite his difficulties, Ibsen
found time to write Love's Comedy, a satirical look at marriage, in 1862.
Ibsen left Norway in 1862, eventually settling in Italy for a time. There
he wrote Brand, a five-act tragedy about a clergyman whose feverish
devotion to his faith costs him his family and ultimately his life in 1865.
The play made him famous in Scandinavia. Two years later, Ibsen
created one of his masterworks, Peer Gynt. A modern take on Greek
epics of the past, the verse play follows the title character on a quest.
In 1868, Ibsen moved to Germany. During his time there, he saw his
social drama The Pillars of Society first performed in Munich. The play
helped launch his career and was soon followed up by one of his most
famous works, A Doll's House. This 1879 play set tongues a-wagging
throughout Europe for exploration of Nora's struggle with the
traditional roles of wife and mother and her own need for self-
exploration. Once again, Ibsen had questioned the accepted social
practices of the times, surprising his audiences and stirring up debate.
Around this time, he returned to Rome. His next work, 1881's Ghosts,
stirred up even more controversy by tackling such topics as incest and
venereal disease. The outcry was so strong that the play wasn't
performed widely until two years later. His next work, An Enemy of the
People, showed one man in conflict with his community. Some critics
say it was Ibsen's response to the backlash he received for Ghosts.
Ibsen wrote The Lady From the Sea (1888) and then soon headed back
to Norway, where he would spend the remainder of his years. One of
his most famous works was to follow, in Hedda Gabler. With Hedda
Gabler (1890), Ibsen created one of the theater's most notorious
characters. Hedda, a general's daughter, is a newlywed who has come
to loathe her scholarly husband, yet she destroys a former love who
stands in her husband's way academically. The character has
sometimes been called the female Hamlet, after Shakespeare's famous
tragic figure.
In 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway as a literary hero. The first play
written after his return to Norway was The Master Builder. The title
character encounters a woman from his past who encourages him to
make good on a promise. In When We Dead Awaken, written in 1899,
an old sculptor runs into one of his former models and tries to
recapture his lost creative spark. It proved to be his final play.

In 1900, Ibsen had a series of strokes that left him unable to write. He
managed to live for several more years, but he was not fully present
during much of this time. Ibsen died on May 23, 1906. His last words
were "To the contrary!" in Norwegian. Considered a literary titan at the
time of his passing, he received a state funeral from the Norwegian
government.

The realist theater of Ibsen

Realism in the theatre was a general movement that began in the 19th-
century theatre, around the 1870s, and remained present through
much of the 20th century. It developed a set of dramatic and theatrical
conventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to
texts and performances. Part of a broader artistic movement, it
includes Naturalism and Socialist realism.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is considered to be the father of modern

realistic drama. His plays attacked society’s values and dealt with
unconventional subjects within the form of the well-made play. Ibsen
learned the craft of playwriting by directing over 100 plays and then
beginning to write his own plays. His early plays were written in verse
and deal with the history/mythology of Norway. In his middle period,
he wrote realistic plays based on the Well-Made Play formula. The
Well-Made Play (WMP) is a play with a strictly defined format, or
formula. There is careful exposition and a structuring of events that
lead to an inevitable conclusion. Even though the conclusion is
inevitable, there is much suspense getting to it. The WMP is essentially
a conflict between good and evil, with the good forces winning out in
the end by a surprising twist (but logical) twist in the plot.
Ibsen reshapes the WMP's focus on events into a focus on social
problems. In the case of A Doll House, the focus is on the lack of
options for women in society. Really, one could say it is a study of the
lack of options for all people in society.

Ibsen refined the WMP format and made it more realistic--for

example, discarding asides and soliloquies, motivating all exposition,
attributing character behavior to environment and heredity. Internal
psychological motivation is emphasized, and his plays are essentially
problem plays, with the problems being a social issue.

Ibsen�s second play (of the middle period) A Doll House (1879)
angered people, but his next play, Ghosts (1882) outraged audiences.
Some of the contemporary reviews said of Ghosts:
 "This disgusting representation. . . . An open drain; a loathsome sore
unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly. . . . Absolutely loathsome and
fetid. . . . Crapulous stuff," [London Daily Telegraph on the 1891 London
premiere of Ghosts].

This is a play without a single obscenity, sexual innuendo, or act of

violence. What Ghosts does is realistically explore marriage in the
Victorian age. Ghosts was actually written in response to the criticism
of Nora in The Doll House for leaving her children/marriage. In Ghosts,
Ibsen showed what happened to a woman who didn't leave. In so
doing, he once again threw a spotlight on the hypocrisy that was taken
for granted at that time and the limited options available to women.

"Because of their harsh subject matter, their commitment to

rigorous investigation, and their unsentimental. . .analysis, Ibsen's
realistic plays shocked and dazzled all of Europe during the 1890s. . . ."
[Theatre R. Cohen--212-213]. Further, Ibsen led the way for other
realistic playwrights. His plays set off a controversy that spread
throughout the world, sweeping the realistic movement along with it.
Ibsen and his plays changed the way that theatre was written and
performed forever.

Byronic Hero

 Byronic hero is a term for a character type

introduced by Lord Byron Known to be intelligent,
gloomy, disappointed with life, not part of any
crowd, mysterious, and (partly because of all of the
above) an irresistibly attractive man. Byron's work
has influenced literature in the 19th and 20th
centuries, and the character has become an
established archetype in contemporary novels and
movies.
The protagonist of Peer Gynt is sometime seen as
versions of, or reactions to, the Byronic hero. Bjorn Tysdahl (2004)
observes
that one side of Peer in Peer Gynt (1867) is 'a composite Byronic hero:
won-
derful teller of tales, social outcast, sexual hero, cynic and, in the last
act,
overcome by despair. There are Byronic elements in the protag-
onists of some of Ibsen's later plays, but the right of the hero to pursue
the
heroic path is often questioned more ruthlessly

Section two

Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt, five act verse play, published in Norwegian in 1867

and produced in 1876. The title character, based on a legendary
Norwegian folk hero, is a rouge who will be destroyed unless he is
saved by the love of a woman.

Peer Gynt chronicles the journey of its titular character from the
Norwegian mountains to the North African desert. According to Klaus
Van Den Berg, "its origins are romantic, but the play also anticipates
the fragmentations of emerging modernism" and the "cinematic script
blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal
ones."Peer Gynt has also been described as the story of a life based
on procrastination and avoidance.The play was written in Italy and a
first edition of 1,250 copies was published on 14 November 1867 by
the Danish publisher Gyldendal in Copenhagen.Although the first
edition swiftly sold out, a reprint of two thousand copies, which
followed after only fourteen days, didn't sell out until seven years
later. Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in deliberate disregard of the limitations
that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on
drama. Its forty scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and
between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric
fantasy and unsentimental realist.