Chapter 22 - Parodies

Summary

This chapter examines the main trends in the international parodies of Ibsen from the late 1880s and ’90s, both those intended primarily for print and for the stage. Proceeding from Margaret Rose’s model of parody as ‘comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material’, the chapter examines the parodic treatments of Ibsen as a retrospective measure of his reception context: where his contemporaries in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and Germany saw him crossing the lines of conventional drama, lines that the respondents either were invested in defending or simply calling attention to in order to understand through parodic distortion the contributions Ibsen was making. Two areas that provoked repeated parodic treatment had to do with varying international perceptions of the dramas’ cultural specificity and their generic indeterminacy.