In the plays subsequent to Hedda Gabler, it cannot be denied that the past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be justified by the genius of an Ibsen.  Three-fourths of the action of The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of the past.  Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical purposes of the everyday stage.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1:  Writing of Le Supplice d’une Femme, Alexandre Dumas fils said:  “This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic and interesting in all drama.  But a situation is not an idea.  An idea, has a beginning, a middle and an end:  an exposition, a development, a conclusion.  Any one can relate a dramatic situation:  the art lies in preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in untying the knot.”]

[Footnote 2:  This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen.  There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, dramatizes the narration.]

[Footnote 3:  See Chapter XII.]

[Footnote 4:  This must not be taken to imply that, in a good stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted.  Mr. Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several advantages in his retention.  Among the rest, it permitted the retention of one of Hamlet’s most characteristic soliloquies.]

[Footnote 5:  I omit all speculation as to the form which the story assumed in the Ur-Hamlet.  We have no evidence on the point; and, as the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit, even in following his original he was making a deliberate artistic choice.]

[Footnote 6:  Shakespeare committed it in Romeo and Juliet, where he made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of the tragedy.  Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems unaccountable.  A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in buckram).  Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the characters to whom the narration is addressed.  But in these cases its purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience—­it belongs, not to the “intelligence department,” but to the department of analysis.]

[Footnote 7:  I say “variety” rather than complexity because I take it that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very complex.  The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.]