Actress Elizabeth Robins, encountering Ibsen's Doll's House for the first time in a Novelty Theatre performance in June 1889, was thrilled by both the boldness of the play's ideology and the emotional power of the characters and the acting. The one element with which she found fault in the production, however, was Nora's tarantella, which she described nearly forty years later as “a piece of theatricalism, Ibsen's one concession to the effect-hunting that he had come to deliver us from.” William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker concurred with Robins's assessment, criticizing Nora's dance as the play's “flawed streak,” as “a theatrical effect, of an obvious, unmistakable kind” and “Ibsen's last concession to … the theatrical orthodoxy of his earlier years.” The tarantella, they agreed, was an embarrassing irrelevance, a crowd-pleasing distraction from the play's serious brainwork, simply an opportunity for the lead actress to display her agility and her well-shaped legs.

The London premieres of Henrik Ibsen’s plays in the late 1880s and 1890s sparked strong reactions both of admiration and disgust. This controversy, I suggest, was largely focused on national identity and artistic cosmopolitanism. While Ibsen’s English supporters viewed him as a leader of a new international theatrical movement, detractors dismissed him as an obscure writer from a primitive, marginal nation. This essay examines the ways in which these competing assessments were reflected in the English adaptations, parodies, and sequels of Ibsen’s plays that were written and published during the final decades of the nineteenth century, texts by Henry Herman and Henry Arthur Jones, Walter Besant, Bernard Shaw, Eleanor Marx and Israel Zangwill, and F. Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie). These rewritings tended to respond to Ibsen’s foreignness in one of three ways: Either to assimilate the plays’ settings, characters, and values into normative Englishness; to exaggerate their exoticism (generally in combination with a suggestion of moral danger); or to keep their Norwegian settings and depict those settings (along with characters and ideas) as ordinary and familiar. Through their varying responses to Ibsen’s Norwegian origin, I suggest, these adaptations offered a uniquely practical and concrete medium for articulating ideas about the ways in which art shapes both national identity and the international community.

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