cultural resources in henrik ibsen's early environment - Ibsen.net

("Fruentimmerhaderen"). The company wins greater and greater praise every time, and it
deserved it not least yesterday. In the first play, of a tragic subject, Madame Petersen --
this theatre's Melpomene -- gave Donna Clara's role with so much naturalness and
feeling, that it seemed she really found herself in that unhappy situation. How she was
able to manifest the rapturous dismay which came over her at seeing her former lover
again, and how she was able to express her inner passions, when she had to battle
rationally against the incitement to flee which was imposed on her by the lover, to whom
she would willingly have given herself with all her soul - because fidelity to her hard,
stone-hearted husband demanded it! Her face, her whole appearance cried out obviously
how her heart was torn apart by sorrow, when her husband, whose strict words she
listened to with the suffered obedience she had promised him, commanded that the door
to the alcove, into which her lover had slipped, should be walled up, so that he must
languish there - yes, her whole inner death-like anguish during the execution of this work
showed itself so naturally in her acting, that she awakened sympathy in no small degree.
[Quoted in English:] "Players are mirrors made for men to see, how bad they are, how
good they ought to be," says an English author, and the truth of this showed itself in this
performance. That Madame Petersen was not applauded as loudly as previously came
probably from the unexpected tragic ending of the play, after which the audience sank
down in a pause, like that which usually follows when one has read the last lines of a too-
thrilling novel; there is no other way to explain this circumstance.
The melancholy feelings which the presentation of this scene had awakened, were soon
alleviated, when the next play was performed, and what one had missed in the foregoing
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