Three Dramas | Page 3

Vienna, and other German and
Austrian theatres. It was played in Paris, at the Théâtre Libre in 1894.
The character of Berent, the lawyer, which became a favourite one with
the famous Swedish actor Ernst Possart, was admittedly more or less of
a portrait of a well-known Norwegian lawyer, by name Dunker. When
Björnson was writing the play, he went to stay for some days with
Dunker, who was to instruct him as to the legal aspect of bankruptcy.
Björnson took the opportunity of studying the lawyer as well as the
law.

The King (_Kongen_) was written at Aulestad, the Norwegian home in
which Björnson settled after his return from abroad, and was published
at Copenhagen in 1877. It is perhaps not surprising that the play, with
its curious blend of poetry and social philosophy, and its somewhat
exuberant (though always interesting) wordiness, was not at first a
conspicuous success on the stage; but the interest aroused by the
published book was enormous. It was widely read and vigorously
discussed, both in Scandinavia and abroad; and while, on the one hand,
it brought upon Björnson the most scurrilous abuse and the harshest
criticism from his political opponents, on the other hand a prominent
compatriot of his (whose opinion was worth having) gave it as his
verdict, at a political meeting held soon after the play's publication, that
"the most notable thing that has happened in Norway of late--or at any
rate, one of the most notable--in my opinion is this last book of
Björnson's--The King."
The idea of a "democratic monarchy"--a kind of reformed
constitutional monarchy, that should be a half-way house on the road to
republicanism--was not entirely new; Björnson's success was in
presenting the problem as seen from the _inside_--that is to say, from
the king's point of view. His opponents, of course, branded him as a
red-hot republican, which he was not. In a preface he wrote for a later
edition of the play, he says that he did not intend the play mainly as an
argument in favour of republicanism, but "to extend the boundaries of
free discussion"; but that, at the same time, he believed the republic to
be the ultimate form of government, and all European states to be
proceeding at varying rates of speed towards it.
The King is composed of curiously incongruous elements. The railway
meeting in the first act is pure comedy of a kind to compare with the
meeting in Ibsen's _An Enemy of Society_; the last act is melodrama
with a large admixture of remarkably interesting social philosophy; the
intervening acts betray the poet that always underlay the dramatist in
Björnson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the
wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the
mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm
of what has gone before: And--strangest incongruity of all in a play so

essentially "actual"--there is in the original, between each act, a
mysterious "mellemspil," or "interlude," in verse, consisting of
somewhat cryptic dialogues between Genii and Unseen Choirs in the
clouds, between an "Old Grey Man" and a "Chorus of Tyrants" in a
desolate scene of snow and ice, between Choruses of Men, Women,
and Children in a sylvan landscape, and so forth--their utterances being
of the nature of the obscurest choruses in the Greek dramatists, but for
the most part with a less obvious relevance to the play itself. Such a
device leads the present-day reader's thoughts inevitably to the use
made of the "unseen chorus," in a similar way, by Thomas Hardy in
_The Dynasts_; but Hardy's interludes are closely relevant to his drama
and help it on its way, which Björnson's do not. They have been
entirely omitted in the present translation, on the ground of their
complete superfluity as well as from the extreme difficulty of retaining
their "atmosphere" in translation.
None of the three plays in the present volume have previously been
translated into English. German, French, and Swedish versions of The
Editor are extant; German, Swedish, Finnish, French, and Hungarian of
_The Bankrupt_; French and Spanish of The King.
R. FARQUHARSON SHARP.
The following is a list of the works of Björnstjerne Björnson:--
DRAMATIC AND POETIC WORKS.--Mellem Slagene (Between the
Battles), 1857. Halte-Hulda (Lame Hulda), 1858. Kong Sverre (King
Sverre), 1861. Sigurd Slembe (Sigurd the Bastard), 1862; translated by
W. M. Payne, 1888. Maria Stuart i Skotland, 1864. De Nygifte (The
Newly-Married Couple), 1865; translated by T. Soelfeldt, 1868; by S.
and E. Hjerleid, 1870; as A Lesson in Marriage, by G. I. Colbron, 1911.
Sigurd Jorsalfar (Sigurd the Crusader), 1872. Redaktören (The Editor),
1874. En Fallit (A Bankruptcy), 1874. Kongen (The King), 1877.
Leonarda, 1879. Det ny System (The New System), 1879. En Hanske,
1883; translated as A