In spite of Ibsen’s ten years of apprenticeship in two theaters, in daily contact with the practical business of the stage, it was not with prose-dramas of contemporary life that he first came forward as a dramatist.  In fact, his juvenile ‘Katilina’ (1850) was written when he was but just of age, before he was attached to the theater professionally, before he had read any dramatists except Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger, and before he had had the chance to see much real acting on the stage itself.  It was while he was engaged in producing the plays of others that he brought out also his own ‘Mistress Inger at Ostraat’ (1855), and the ‘Vikings at Helgeland’ (1858), both of them actable and often acted.  They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and now Hugo.

‘Mistress Inger’ is a historical melodrama, with a gloomy castle, spectral pictures and secret passages, with shifting conspiracies, constant mystery-mongering and contorted characters.  The inexpert playwright uses soliloquy not merely to unveil the soul of the speaker (its eternally legitimate use), but also to convey information to the audience as to the facts of the intrigue (an outworn expedient Ibsen never condescended to use in the later social dramas).  The plot of ‘Mistress Inger’ is not veracious or convincing or even plausible; and the play lacks the broad simplicity of story to be found in the later ‘Vikings,’ a saga-like drama, a tale of blood and fate, which recalls Wagnerian opera in its primitive massiveness, in the vigor of its legend, in its tragic pathos, and in its full-blooded characters larger than life and yet pitifully human.  Power again there is in a third drama dealing with the historic past of Norway, the ‘Pretenders’ (1864), which has a savage nobility of spirit.  It is true that the masterful figure of Bishop Nicholas is enigmatic enough to have stalked out of one of Hugo’s lyrical melodramas, but to counterbalance this there is a pithy wisdom in the talk of the Skald which one would seek in vain in the French romanticist drama.

Nowadays many of us are inclined to regard the historical drama as a bastard form and to agree with Maeterlinck in dismissing even the most meritorious attempts as “artificial poems that arise from the impossible marriage of past and present.”  Already between the ‘Vikings’ and the ‘Pretenders’ had Ibsen undertaken a play dealing with contemporary social usages.  ‘Love’s Comedy’ (1862) made its way on the stage; and it has found an English translator.  But in this rendering it reveals itself as an attempt to commingle romance and satire; it appears to us as hopelessly unfunny; and there is an artistic inconsistency between a stern realism seeking to handle actual life with rigorous tensity and a soaring idealism which keeps obtruding itself.