Antony and Cleopatra and Rosmersholm: "Third Empire" Love Tragedies

Abstract

1 COMPARATIVE •rama Volume 20Spring 1986Number 1 Antony and Cleopatra and Rosmersholm: "Third Empire" Love Tragedies Errol Durbach "W. Shackspear and his influence on Scandinavian Art": all we know about the lecture that Ibsen delivered on Shakespeare in November of 1855 is its mangled title;l and although Halvdan Koht has done his best to project what Ibsen might have said, his essay on "Shakespeare and Ibsen" remains highly speculative. After gathering all the scattered allusions and Ibsen's occasionally mischievous misquotations from Shakespeare , Koht concludes his study of dramatic connections by endorsing Edmund Gosse's rather lame insistence that there is "something of Shakespeare" in Ibsen simply because there has to be.2 Arguments for influence are, at best, hazardous. In 1852 Ibsen saw Shakespeare on stage for the first time, in Copenhagen : productions of Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and As You Like It; and in 1855 he directed Livet i skoven (Life in the Forest), an adaptation of As You Like It, which ERROL DURBACH is Professor of English and Theater at the University of British Columbia. He has previously published in Comparative Drama, and is the author of 'Ibsen the Romantic': Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays (1982). Currently he is working on a study of Erotic Tragedy. 2 Comparative Drama closed after two performances in Bergen.3 What else he might have seen (or read in Danish translation) remains a matter for further speculation. Influence, such as it may be, might have come from secondary sources: from Hettner, or from Georg Brandes' three-volume study of Shakespeare which Ibsen received from the author in October 1896. The first comparative studies of Shakespeare and Ibsen argued polemically not for influence, but for Ibsen's superiority. The argument is unmistakably Shavian: Shakespear had put ourselves on the stage but not our situations. Our uncles seldom murder our fathers, and cannot legally marry our mothers; we do not meet witches; . . . and when we raise money by bills we do not promise to pay pounds of our flesh. Ibsen supplies the want left by Shakespear. He gives us not only ourselves , but ourselves in our own situations. The things that happen to his stage figures are things that happen to us. One consequence is that his plays are much more important to us than Shakespear's.4 It is a witty argument. But if we no longer die by leaping on our swords or applying asps to our bosoms, neither do we plunge headlong from bridges into the mill-race. The whole point about the Ibsenian situation is that one doesn't do that sort of thing in the bourgeois world. The situations in Ibsen are as wonderful and as remote as anything in Shakespeare. For succeeding generations of comparatists, the two great playwrights are no longer in competition. For Eric Bentley, Ibsen is Shakespearean "only in being genuinely imaginative and poetic."5 For George Steiner, Ibsen is the first dramatist in over two centuries to have provided a dramatic alternative to the Shakespearean theater.6 And for Inga-Stina Ewbank, while Ibsen's Nordic temperament is crucially different from Shakespeare 's English sensibility, their visions nevertheless bear strange and remarkable affmities.7 It is in this spirit that I want to discuss Antony and Cleopatra as an erotic tragedy where, as John Danby has suggested in his famous essay, "Judgment knits itself back into character as it might do in Ibsen, and character issues from a mutable and ambiguous flux of things."8 Against this play I would like to place Ibsen's Rosmersholm. In an unstable world of shifting political alliances and warring conflicts , two pairs of middle-aged lovers look for consolation against universal collapse in a domain of intensely private Errol Durbach3 romantic ideals—only to confront the human fallibility at the heart of their relationship. Two great value systems—Roman nobility and Egyptian sensuality, Christian conservatism and pagan energy—merge, "melt" into each other with corrosive effect, and disintegrate. "[F]rom the very union which seems to promise strength," as Danby observes in his discussion of Antony and Cleopatra, "dissolution flows."9 What I want to investigate, in comparing the two plays...