PAGE INTRODUCTION TO “PEER GYNT” vii _By_ WILLIAM ARCHER “PEER GYNT” 1 _Translated by_ WILLIAM AND CHARLES ARCHER PEER GYNT. INTRODUCTION. The publication of _Brand_, in March 1866, brought Ibsen fame (in Scandinavia) and relieved him from the immediate pressure of poverty. Two months later the Storthing voted him a yearly “poet-pension” of £90; and with this sum, as he wrote to the Minister who had been mainly instrumental in furthering his claim, he felt “his future assured,” so that he could henceforth “devote himself without hindrance to his calling.” This first glimpse of worldly prosperity, no doubt, brought with it the lighter mood which distinguishes _Peer Gynt_ from its predecessor. To call it the gayest of Ibsen’s works is not, perhaps, to say very much. Its satire, indeed, is bitter enough; but it is not the work of an unhappy man. The character of Peer Gynt, and many of his adventures, are conceived with unmistakable gusto. Some passages even bear witness to an exuberance of animal spirits which reminds one of Ben Jonson’s saying with regard to Shakespeare—“aliquando sufflaminandus erat.” The summer of 1866 Ibsen spent at Frascati, in the Palazzo Gratiosi, where he lived “most comfortably and cheaply.” He found Frascati and Tusculum “indescribably delightful.” From the windows of his study he could see Soracte, “rising isolated and beautiful from the level of the immense plain ... the battlefield where the chief engagement in the world’s history took place.” So he writes in a letter to Paul Botten-Hansen, and immediately afterwards proceeds: “I shall soon be setting to work in good earnest. I am still wrestling with my subject, but I know that I shall get the upper hand of the brute before long, and then everything will go smoothly.” But was the play here referred to _Peer Gynt_? Perhaps not. From a letter to his publisher, Hegel, written three months later, we learn that at that time he was still turning over several themes in his mind, and that one of them dealt with the period of Christian IV. of Denmark. It is in a letter to Hegel, dated from Rome, January 5, 1867, that we find the first unmistakable reference to _Peer Gynt_: “Now I must tell you that my new work is well under way, and will, if nothing untoward happens, be finished early in the summer. It is to be a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one of the Norwegian peasantry’s half-mythical, fantastic heroes of _recent_ times. It will bear no resemblance to _Brand_, contain no direct polemics and so forth. I have long had the subject in my thoughts; now the entire plan is worked out and written down, and the first act begun. The thing