“Hedda Gabler is, in short, the study of an exasperated woman; and it may certainly be declared that the subject was not in advance, as a theme for scenic treatment, to be pronounced promising. There could in fact, however, be no more suggestive illustration of the folly of quarreling with an artist over his subject. Ibsen has had only to take hold of this one in earnest, to make it, against every presumption, live with an intensity of life. […] Something might have been gained, entailing perhaps a loss in another direction, by tracing the preliminary stages, showing the steps in Mrs. Tesman’s history which led to the spasm, as it were, on which the curtain rises and of which the breathless duration - ending in death - is the period of the piece. But a play is above everything a work of selection, and Ibsen, with his curious and beautiful passion for the unity of time (carried in him to a point which almost always implies also that of place), condemns himself to admirable rigors. We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply find them in her character. Her motives are just her passions. What the four acts show us is these motives and that character - complicated, strange, irreconcilable, infernal - playing themselves out. We know too little why she married Tesman, we see too little why she ruins Lovborg; but we recognize that she is infinitely perverse, and Heaven knows that, as the drama goes, the crevices we are called upon to stop are singularly few.”
