Shaw's Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal by Joan Templeton (review)

Ghosts, supposedly, are spirits of the dead who haunt the living, are external to the living, and may or may not be related to the living, as in the case of the typical "haunted house" plot where people buy a haunted house they didn't know was haunted. But "ghosts" in great literature are mostly metaphorical/symbolic, representing a haunting from within by the consequences of one's own bad ideas or mistakes that come back to haunt one in the form of harmful actions that grow worse as time goes on. In Henrik Ibsen's great play Ghosts, the ghosts are more specifically identified by Mrs. Alving in a long speech but summed up thusly to Pastor Manders, a man she once left her dissolute husband for but only to be sent back to her husband for reasons of social propriety: "I almost think we are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that 'walks' in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off." It is her own social constraints and obligations that haunt her, aided and abetted by Pastor Manders, and that she feels she must shed. This is quintessential Shaw as well, but Ibsen got there first.

"Shaw's Ghost" is more of the literal kind in that it was external to him. It was a collective ghost that haunted him, the result of an erroneous "group think" that he couldn't escape. Shaw is certainly not the only author to be haunted by a damaging and mistaken critical opinion, but perhaps none has done more undeserved harm, partly in living so long past the author's death to haunt others.

Shaw's Ghost was "summoned," it seemed, when in the summer of 1890 Bernard Shaw lectured his fellow Fabians about Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, which seems to have served its original purpose well, but it and the publications of it titled The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891, 1913, and 1922, supplemented by updating to the death of Ibsen in one case and additional Prefaces in all cases, have been much misunderstood in the last 128 years, particularly by those who think in them Shaw misrepresented Ibsen. But Ibsen scholar Joan Templeton, in Shaw's Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal, in a heroic effort to lay to rest the ghost that haunted Shaw all his life and still haunts Shaw studies and Ibsen studies, does a wonderfully thorough job of correcting the mistaken notion that Shaw misrepresented Ibsen because he was antipathetic to everything Ibsen stood for as an artist, for nothing could be falser.

The general misreading, at the beginning, is summarized in the following bit of logic chopping: the original of The Quintessence had been read to socialists by a socialist, ergo it must be a preachy socialist tract (whether you've read it or not), which couldn't possibly fit Ibsen as everybody knows that Ibsen refused to join any "ism," "socialism" among them. Moreover, Ibsen was an artist focused on depicting "real life" and "soul states" and was not interested in using his plays to promote moral ideas or social reform. Therefore Shaw must have gotten Ibsen wrong, even though another look at Mrs. Alving's opinion above disputes that.

By the way, this insistence on Shaw's supposed misrepresentation of Ibsen was on the part of both those Ibsen enthusiasts who, Templeton says, didn't really understand Ibsen ("Ibsenites") and those who did ("Ibsenists"), and thus Shaw had to contend with a bipolar ghost as well.

The false understanding of Ibsen added to the false logic that a socialist couldn't possibly understand a nonsocialist and was compounded by a legitimate misunderstanding following from the fact that the Fabians misleadingly titled their series of summer...