It extends the range of expression over that available to prose, for a subtle instrument follows the subtleties of nature, revealing more of persons, their motives, thoughts and situations than blunter tools can achieveif verse, or poetry, makes the expression of the drama more complete it makes it more dramaticalthough verse is not indispensable to fine dramatic art the greatest plays have nevertheless all been in verse1 he was stating what to Aristotle and Shakespeare would have seemed an undeniable truth and would have hardly needed defending. But when Ibsen wrote to Lucie Wolf in 1883 stating that verse “has been most injurious to dramatic artIt is improbable that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future since the aims of the dramatists of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it”2 he was reacting to the perceived failure of the verse-play to marry effectively the areas of concern on the stage and areas of action related to contemporary experience. In the 19th Century, he was not alone in this opinion; in 1877 Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, “Mais, hélas! cette pièce est en vers, et l’ennui s’y promène librement entre les rimes”3 and previously both Stendhal and Motte were adamant that prose was the only way forward, verse being too hampered by rules.4
There was then, a growing consensus that verse drama, a form that had been the dominant and almost unchallenged medium of dramatic theatre up to Ibsen’s own epoch, had become out of step with the sensitivities of the time and was in the popular mind rapidly becoming distant and vague, an archaic art form dealing only with the exotic and the heroic.5 And there was merit in this observation: whereas the prose dramatists of the 19th Century were pushing boundaries in both language and ideas, verse dramatists, under the long shadow cast by the Elizabethans and in particular Shakespeare, were hard...