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Abraham and Brand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

John M. Hems
Affiliation:
Glasgow

Extract

It should be well known that the philosophy of soren Kierkegaard exerted considerable inflence upon Ibsen the playwright, despite the latter's reluctance to admit as much. When Ibsen's play Brand was first published in Copenhagen, in 1866, it was hailed as a dramatic representation of Kierkegaar's philosophy, and subsequent critics have also indicated in a general way the Kierkegaardian concepts with which this play abounds. The earlier Love's comedy is also vibrant with Kierkegaardian undertones, and the fact that something of this same quality is echoed and re-echoed throughout the playwrite's entire corpus suggest something more than a merely literary influences: it indicates a temperamental affinity between the two authors.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1964

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References

page 137 note 1 See Halvdan Koht's Life of Isben, for example.Google Scholar

page 139 note 1 Fear and Trembling, p. 75.Google Scholar

page 139 note 2 Brand, Everyman's Library, p. 68. (There are better translations of the play, but this one is most readily available.)Google Scholar

page 139 note 3 Halvdan Koht's Life of Ibsen, p. 200.Google Scholar

page 139 note 4 Fear and Trembling, p. 103.Google Scholar

page 140 note 1 Fear and Trembling, p. 157.Google Scholar

page 141 note 1 There is no argument in Fear and Trembling to the effect that ethics is not universal. Such an argument is to be found elsewhere in Kierkegaard: e.g. Point of View.Google Scholar

page 142 note 1 I suggest that a similar argument may apply to certain heroes of Eliot, Montherlant, Marcel, et al.Google Scholar

page 143 note 1 Fear and Trembling, p. 147, et seq.Google Scholar