A Playwright Henrik Ibsen as a Father of Modern Drama and the Champion of the Naturalist Movement - Essay Example

Among Ibsen's works, Peer Gynt is something of an anomaly. The Norwegian playwright is known mostly for such dour, realistic prose-dramas as Hedda Gabbler and The Wild Duck. But Peer Gynt, a much earlier work, is exuberant, frequently humorous and written in lively, highly coloured poetry. Its hero, Peer Gynt is one of those figures of world literature who, like Falstaff or Don Quixote, seem even larger than the works that gave them birth. Peer is a Nordic Everyman, who in the course of the play ages from a brawling, fantasy-prone youth to an indomitable old man.

During his long life, he suffers the pangs of love, wins and loses power and fortune, and has preposterous adventures with trolls, monkeys and Arabian belly dancers. Those adventures are essentially a dramatization of his spiritual progress or lack of it. It is, like King Lear and Faust and a couple of others, a dramatic summation that encapsulates a universe in some ways the most inclusive and essential. Certainly, it is the last word on man's double nature as questing spirit and wallowing troll.

And it squarely confronts the ultimate questions of being and extinction, of the possibilities of God, the devil, and mere dissolution. Boldly, it asks what is salvation, if such a thing exists. More boldly yet, it probes deeper and deeper into life with poetic fancy and earthy humour. Boldest of all, it does not stoop to easy answers. That's why Peer Gynt continues to be a fruitful puzzle for successive generations of scholars, critics, and artists.