Tuesday, March 13, 2007

FRESH FROM THE HORSE's
GARRISON...

It was on this day in 1891 that Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts opened on the London stage.

Ghosts was considered a controversial play because it contained details about incest and sexually transmitted diseases, and Ibsen refused to give his audiences the happy endings they were used to. The play had already been banned in St. Petersburg on religious grounds when it premiered in London. Ibsen wrote in Act 2:

I almost think we're all of us ghosts. ... It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's 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 can't get rid of them.

Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be
ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
c

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