Henrik Ibsen’s Catilina and poetics of romantic drama

Abstract

The article deals with the links of Ibsen’s first drama with Romantic poetics. The play is interesting in that what it slightly foreshadows and which tradition it inherits. The path to The Vikings at Helgeland (1857), Ibsen’s first masterpiece in a genre which the playwright determined as a historical tragedy, began with the Catilina (1850). The semantic core of the work is not a socio-political conflict relating to the 1st century BC and capable of causing certain topical allusions, but an internal drama experienced by the “demonic” hero of Romanticism. The author emphasizes Kierkegaardian echoes in Catilina, referring to Either/Or (1843) which was familiar to Ibsen in his Grimstad years as one of his friends of youth witnessed later. The motives of disappointment in history and unbelief in the universal update, typical of late Romanticists, seem rather simplistic and somewhat naïve in young Ibsen. But even taking into account artistic immaturity of the playwright’s firstborn drama, it must be noted that because of the Romantic influence there is an archetype of a historical character in Catilina, which will develop later into much more complex images of Jarl Skule and Caesar Julian. At the same time the play, despite its imperfection, anticipates main themes in Ibsen’s later works, particularly John Gabriel Borkman (1896).