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Love's Comedy is a play by Henrik Ibsen. It was first published in 1862 and caused outrage when first performed at the Christiania Theatre.

The play is written in verse and the language is loaded with vivid imagery. Ibsen allows the characters arias full of passion and poetry. This is the bourgeois world we see in his later, apparently naturalistic plays but written in such a way that it elevates its characters to a semi-mythic status more akin to Emperor and Galilean, Brand or Peer Gynt. The people appear to be contemporary types but are given emblematic names such as Falcon, Swan, Strawman and Gold.

Two students – Falk and Lind – are staying at the country house of Mrs. Halm, romancing her two daughters Anna and Svanhild. Lind has ambitions to be a missionary, Falk a great poet. Falk criticises bourgeois society in his verse and insists that we live in the passionate moment. Lind’s proposal of marriage to Anna is accepted, but Svanhild rejects the chance to become Falk’s muse, as poetry is merely writing, and he can do that on his own and without really risking himself for his beliefs.

Falk is liberated by her words and decides to put ideas into action. When Lind is persuaded by Anna’s friends not to leave as a missionary but stay in a cosy existence looking after his wife, Falk denounces the lot of them – saying that their marriages have nothing to do with love. Society is outraged and does not wish to be reminded of the split between ideal and reality. Falk is ostracized but Svanhild admires his courage. They plan to run off together and live the ideal.

The pastor Staamand and the clerk Styver attempt to persuade Falk from his course but the demands of respectability and security cannot assuage him. Finally, the rich businessman Guldstad asks whether their relationship can survive the waning of the first flush of love. Falk and Svanhild admit that it cannot and Svanhild accepts Guldstad’s proposal of a safe, financially secure marriage rather than sully the experience of her love for Falk by seeing it die. Falk leaves to write songs which celebrate an untainted love and Svanhild sits gloomily amongst the world of convention – a housewife who once had passion and now lives on it’s memory.

“Ibsen has arrived as a dramatist, and Love’s Comedy is his first assured masterpiece, the brilliant culmination of a long and awkward apprenticeship.” - To The Third Empire: Ibsen’s Early Drama by Brian Johnson, p104.

• Love's Comedy, available at Project Gutenberg.
• Kærlighedens Komedie, available at Project Gutenberg. (Norwegian)