Nora Helmer and Thora Helmer: Henrik Ibsen at Play with the Vaudeville

ABSTRACT This article gives evidence for considering the vaudeville genre as a factor that complicates our received understanding of the plays of Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. It situates Ibsen’s activity as a theater practitioner in relation to both the prolific French dramatist Eugène Scribe and the Danish theater director and dramatist Johan Ludvig Heiberg, explores Ibsen’s own critical writing about the popular theater, and then traces intertextual resonances with the work of yet another Danish dramatist, Erik Bøgh. In particular, the author links Bøgh’s all-but-forgotten 1853 vaudeville, Et enfoldigt Pigebarn (A Guileless Girl) with Ibsen’s universally acclaimed modern dramas, Et Dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House) and Hedda Gabler (1890; Hedda Gabler). What this re-contextualization reveals, is an Ibsen who was far more oriented toward and influenced by transnational popular theater genres than previous scholarship has recognized.