Hedda Gabler — Commentary

In brief

A general’s daughter comes home from a honeymoon of nearly six months to a villa she cannot afford and a husband she does not love. In less than two days she wrecks a man who once adored her, burns the only copy of his book, hands him a pistol and asks him to use it well. Then she learns how he actually died, sees that a smiling judge now owns her, and shoots herself in the back room while the others sit working at the table.

The story could be melodrama. It is saved by Ibsen’s refusal to explain Hedda and by a streak of comedy that runs right to the last line. She is one of the great parts in the theatre because she is frightening, funny, cowardly and pitiable at once, and because nobody on the stage ever understands her.

The argument

Ibsen told his French translator what the title meant: Hedda, as a personality, was to be regarded “rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife”, and he had wanted to depict “human beings, human emotions, and human destinies” rather than to deal in “so-called problems”. Readers who want a feminist tract from the author of A Doll’s House are half right. Hedda’s trap is real. She has a general’s tastes and a girl’s education, no money, no work, and one way out of a dull spinsterhood, which she took because, as she tells Brack, “I had positively danced myself tired, my dear Judge. My day was done” (Act 2).

What the play refuses is the consoling next step, in which the trapped woman turns out to be good. Hedda wants the freedom of the men whose talk she listened to, and she despises the woman who actually took it. Thea Elvsted, timid and silly, has walked out on her husband and made a man write a book. Hedda, far cleverer, has done nothing, and she knows it. Her wish is exact: “I want for once in my life to have power to mould a human destiny.”

The deepest cut is reserved for her idea of beauty. She believes one clean, brave act could redeem a mean life, and she dreams of Lovborg returning from the party “with vine-leaves in his hair”. Everything she touches then fails that test. He does not die grandly at his own hand. He goes to a brothel to accuse the women of stealing his manuscript, and the pistol goes off. She had thought of the breast. Brack corrects her: “No—in the bowels.” Her answer is the sentence the play has been building to: “Oh, what curse is it that makes everything I touch turn ludicrous and mean?” (Act 4).

The shape of the play

Four acts, one set, from one morning to the following evening. Act 1 brings everyone into the drawing room and shows us Hedda being cruel about a bonnet. Act 2 holds the long afternoon: her talk with Brack, her talk with Lovborg over a photograph album while her husband sits next door, and the moment she talks him back into drinking. Act 3 happens at dawn, after the party, off stage, has done its work, and ends with the manuscript in the stove. Act 4 is the reckoning.

This is Ibsen’s method at its leanest: almost everything that matters is over when the curtain rises, and the past comes out sideways. Lovborg and Hedda can speak of what they were to each other only in low voices over the album, with Tesman in earshot. The ending has the same economy. Hedda closes the curtain, plays a wild dance on the piano, and calls Brack “the one cock in the basket”. A shot follows.

Then come the two most daring lines Ibsen wrote. Tesman shrieks, “Shot herself in the temple! Fancy that!” He has said “Fancy that” all evening; it is the only phrase he has. And Brack, half fainting in the arm-chair, gives the judgment of respectable society on the whole play: “Good God!—people don’t do such things.” An audience should be appalled and should nearly laugh.

Pistols and paper

Few plays are so completely carried by objects. The first are small: Aunt Julia’s new bonnet, which Hedda pretends to take for the maid’s (“She has left her old bonnet lying about on a chair”), and Tesman’s embroidered slippers, “My old morning-shoes! My slippers”, which she will not look at.

The large objects are a pair of pistols and a heap of paper. The pistols arrive at the end of Act 1, when Tesman warns her that there will be no entertaining and no horse, and she answers that she will still have “one thing at least to kill time with”. Which thing? “General Gabler’s pistols.” His portrait hangs in the inner room. Act 2 opens with her firing one of them across the garden at Brack, half as a joke. In Act 3 she gives its fellow to Lovborg. In Act 4 the police have it, and Brack, who recognises it, has her.

The paper is Lovborg’s new book, about the future of civilisation, written with Thea at his elbow and carried about in a single copy. When Lovborg lies that he has torn it up, Thea calls that a child-murder, and Hedda accepts the metaphor. Alone, she feeds the stove with it quire by quire: “Now I am burning your child, Thea!—Burning it, curly-locks!” The curls go back to school, where Thea remembers that Hedda “used always to pull my hair”. The fire goes forward to Hedda’s own body. Early on, her husband notices how she “has filled out”, and Hedda cannot bear the subject. She kills herself carrying a child she has only hinted at, on the day she destroyed the one she envied.

The last irony is that Thea has kept the notes. By the end she and Tesman are at the table together patching the book up, and Hedda has no part left in her own drama.

The people

Hedda Tesman

Ibsen’s title refuses her married name. Hedda calls herself “A terrible coward” (Act 2), and it is the truest thing she says: she could never have gone with Lovborg, because the fear of scandal is stronger than anything else in her. The one brave thing she ever did was to threaten him with a pistol when he came too close. She is also cruel, intelligent and bored, “Boring myself to death”.

George Tesman

Tesman is a kind, plodding scholar who has spent the honeymoon in archives gathering material on “the domestic industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages”. He is the joke of the play and also the only person in it who behaves decently about the lost manuscript.

Eilert Lovborg

Lovborg is the brilliant drunk who has dried out under Thea’s care and written a popular book “dealing with the march of civilisation”, with a greater one to follow. He is a sociologist and not a poet, which Archer’s introduction pointed out against critics who complained that he shows no genius. A man who recovered through one woman’s belief cannot withstand another’s contempt.

Thea Elvsted

Everyone, including Thea, thinks she is a fool, yet she has done the thing Hedda could not, and at the end she calmly starts again. Her wish that she could “inspire your husband in the same way” is said to Hedda’s face, without malice, and it is the most terrible line anyone speaks to her.

Judge Brack

Brack is the society man who wants a “triangle” with a pleasant wife and a dull husband, and who works with perfect patience. His victory comes in a few courteous words about the pistol and the possibility of a court appearance alongside Mademoiselle Diana. Hedda sees what it means at once: “A slave, a slave then!”

The English of it

The free text here is the one credited to Edmund Gosse and William Archer: Gosse published an English version in 1891, and this later form, with Archer’s introduction and notes, comes from his Collected Works edition of 1907. It is complete in all four acts. What it cannot do is sound like speech. Its English is stiff and of its period; Tesman’s nervous verbal tic becomes the fussy “eh?”; Løvborg loses his letter to become Lovborg; and the crucial shifts in Norwegian between the intimate du and the formal De, which plot the whole of the love scene in Act 2, can only be reported in the notes. Michael Meyer’s is the theatre’s standard, James McFarlane and Jens Arup’s for Oxford is the scholar’s, and Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik’s Penguin Classics translation of 2019 is the newest worth getting.

How it was made

Ibsen wrote the play in Munich in 1890, and it appeared in Copenhagen on 16 December. The first performance was in Munich on 31 January 1891, with Ibsen present.

Archer’s introduction collects the raw material, most of it from Georg Brandes. A Norwegian composer’s wife burnt his finished symphony in a jealous rage. Another woman rolled a keg of brandy into the study of her reformed husband on his birthday, to test her power, and came back to find him on the floor. A young Danish writer, called Holm by Brandes, drank from breakfast on and lost a manuscript on a night’s carouse. Hedda herself, Archer insists, had no model, only sources for single traits.

Joyce and Ibsen

James Joyce’s first publication in a journal was about Ibsen. “Ibsen’s New Drama” appeared in the Fortnightly Review on 1 April 1900, when he was eighteen and at University College Dublin. The claim needs two qualifications. His father had printed a childhood poem on Parnell as a broadside for friends in 1891, so this was not the first time Joyce’s words had been set in type. And the essay is not about Hedda Gabler; its subject is When We Dead Awaken, then only months old. Hedda appears in it in passing, as a figure Joyce calls a tragic one, “if such old-world terms may be employed without incongruity”, and the essay dates from her play Ibsen’s “tendency to get out of closed rooms”.

Joyce read late Ibsen as a lesson in unsparing observation. He praised Ibsen’s knowledge of women in words his own later books invite us to test: “he seems to know them better than they know themselves.” Ibsen read the piece and told William Archer he found it “very benevolent”; Archer passed that on, and Joyce wrote back to the old man, in Norwegian he had taught himself, a letter that went unanswered. His one finished play, Exiles, is the fruit of all this. Its drawing rooms and its long confessions are Ibsen’s, as is its central experiment, a husband who sets his wife free to see what she will do.

Readers and critics

The first reviews in Germany, Scandinavia and London were largely baffled or hostile. In Archer’s account London critics were distressed by the “suburbanism” of the piece, and he remarks on “the firm resolution not to understand” in the criticism of the ’nineties. Grant Allen said Hedda was “the girl we take down to dinner in London nineteen times out of twenty”. Henry James, in “On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler” (New Review, 1891), saw that the play’s subject is less an action than a condition.

Joseph Wood Krutch later linked Hedda with Freud, as a heroine whose motives have a secret logic of their own. Other readers have called her a female Hamlet, a useful comparison so long as we remember that Hamlet has a court and a mission, and she has an afternoon.

Afterlives

The first British production, at the Vaudeville Theatre on 20 April 1891, was the work of two actresses, Elizabeth Robins as Hedda and Marion Lea as Thea, who put it on themselves. The role has since drawn Eleonora Duse, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Alla Nazimova, Ingrid Bergman, Peggy Ashcroft and many others. Maggie Smith played it for Ingmar Bergman in London in 1970. Glenda Jackson was nominated for an Academy Award for Trevor Nunn’s film Hedda (1975). Ruth Wilson played it in Ivo van Hove’s production at the National Theatre in 2016, in a version by Patrick Marber, and Tessa Thompson in Nia DaCosta’s film Hedda (2025), which makes Lovborg a woman.

How to read it

Read it twice. Almost every line in Act 1 has a second meaning available only to someone who knows Acts 2 to 4.
See it if you can. The comedy is hard to hear on the page, and Tesman’s “Fancy that” needs an actor.
Use a modern translation for the speeches. Keep the free text for Archer’s introduction and his notes on du and De.
Watch the room. Note what is on the walls, who goes through the curtain and where the stove is.