Love's Comedy

Norwegian: Kjærlighedens Komedie

First published in December 1862.

Translated by C. H. Herford

As a result of being branded an "immoral" work in the press, the Christiania Theatre would not dare to stage this at first. "The play aroused a storm of hostility," Ibsen wrote in its preface three years later, "more violent and more widespread than most books could boast of having evoked in a community the vast majority of whose members commonly regard matters of literature as being of small concern." The only person who approved of it at the time, Ibsen later said, was his wife. He revised the play in 1866, in preparation for its publication "as a Christmas book," as he put it. His decision to make it more appealing to Danish readers by removing many of its specifically Norwegian words has been taken as an early instance of the expression of his contempt for the contemporary Norwegian campaign to purge the language of its foreign influences.

Two students, Falk and Lind, are staying at the country house of Mrs. Halm, romancing her two daughters Anna and Svanhild. Lind has ambitions to be a missionary, Falk a great poet. Falk criticises bourgeois society in his verse and insists that we live in the passionate moment. Lind's proposal of marriage to Anna is accepted, but Svanhild rejects the chance to become Falk's muse, as poetry is merely writing, and he can do that on his own and without really risking himself for his beliefs.

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