THE WILD DUCK was followed at the normal two years'
interval by Rosmersholm ( 1886), Rosmersholm by The Lady from
the Sea ( 1888), and The Lady from the Sea by Hedda Gabler ( 1890).
Rosmersholm, in re-echoing the great constitutional struggle of
Left and Right in Norway, seems to represent something of
a return to the social dramas preceding The Wild Duck. Its
directly political message, however, amounts to 'a plague o' both
your houses', and the drama turns on whether or not Rosmer
and Rebecca can find any grounds for remaining alive. After
Rosmersholm the outside world, in which political parties clash
and newspapers write about it, ceases to exist for Ibsen's
characters and for Ibsen himself even more completely than
it had done in The Wild Duck: the dramas henceforward are
all inner dramas, as indeed Rosmer's had been, of the inhibited
personality contending with its inhibitions. ¹ In The Lady from
the Sea the struggle ends in victory, ² but Hedda Gabler is steeped
in gloom with the same (if fewer) macabre flashes of sardonic
humour as The Wild Duck.

A couple of months after the publication of Hedda Gabler in
February 1891, the author told his German translator, Elias, ³
that he had conceived the idea of a new play in vague outline

-178-