Henrik Ibsen

G. Wilson Knight

Aug 2019 · Plunkett Lake Press

About this ebook

“G. Wilson Knight approaches Ibsen in substantially the same way he approaches Shakespeare. By weaving a fabric of countless quotations from the plays, he attempts primarily to reconstruct Ibsen’s vision rather than to judge it. What emerges most clearly from his examination are Ibsen’s dominant themes. Knight sees Ibsen’s ‘emphasis on vocation, on the instinctive will, forcing persons to self-realization.’ He sees what, for Ibsen, the struggle for self-realization is: a struggle against ‘convention, hypocrisy, sexual passion, marriages of expedience, a corrupt press, and vested interests; and, hardest of all, the past, either of society or of oneself, which may involve guilt and hamper freedom.’ Each of Ibsen’s plays deals centrally with the protagonist’s search for (or avoidance of) his own destiny, which is to find and realize himself. What Knight sees beyond this quest itself and the specific obstacles to its fulfillment is the grandeur with which Ibsen envisioned that fulfillment. The man who achieved self-realization was of the race of new supermen, a genius whose full destiny, in Knight’s words, ‘will be to surpass art, strive for a wholeness including love, touch the occult, and challenge death.’ To Ibsen, self-realization was the only way of resolving the great ‘discords of human nature and human society.’ It was the means for attaining ‘his dream of a new nobility.’” — Irving Deer, Modern Drama

About the author

G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) served as a military courier in World War I in Iraq, India and Persia. After graduating from Oxford University’s St Edmund Hall, he became a distinguished scholar and literary critic, writing on Shakespeare, Byron, Ibsen and Nietzsche. Starting in 1923, he taught English at various schools, and received his first academic post at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College in 1931.

He taught at the Stowe School from 1941 until 1946 and then at Leeds University until his retirement in 1962, first as Reader and starting in 1956 as Professor of English. Eccentric, powerfully original, and an outstanding lecturer, Knight was mainly fascinated by mythical patterns and meanings in literature. His The Wheel of Fire, Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (1930) is one of the most influential books in the field. Knight was also a producer and actor in Shakespearean plays. His staging of Shakespeare was noted for its emphasis on color and symbolism. He also wrote plays for the British stage and television. A believer in spiritualism, Knight was a vice-president of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain.