The League of Youth

"The League of Youth" is a play by Henrik Ibsen finished in early May 1869, following Peer Gynt. It was widely considered Ibsen's most popular play in nineteenth-century Norway, although its initial reception was not successful (due to the active opposition of the followers of a rival dramatist and political opposition leader, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, is said to be inspiration for the play's main character Stensgaard). The play is a comedy about Stensgaard's ambitious formation of the 'League of Youth' party and attempts to get elected. Though rooted in serious events of the time, the play was lauded for its natural and witty dialog, cynical humor and farcical intrigue.

Partial List of Characters

*Stensgaard, charismatic would-be politician
*Brattsberg, an old aristocrat
*Monsen, aristocrat and Brattsburg's rival
*Daniel Hejre, an old gossip

Characters based on real persons?

*Stensgaard is said to be an unflattering depiction of rival playwright, sometime Ibsen friend and oppoisition political figure Bjornstjerne Bjornson).
*Hejre is said to be based on Ibsen's father, Knud.

Summary

Taking a different tack than Ibsen's earlier political play "The Pretenders", the League of Youth features a protagonist Stensgaard, who poses as a political idealist and gathers a new party around him, the 'League of Youth', and aims to eliminate corruption and bring his radical new group to power. In scheming to be elected, he immerses himself in social and sexual intrigue, culminating in such complexity that at the end of the play all the women whom he has at one time planned to marry reject him, and his plans for election fail.

Criticism

Ibsen biographer Robert Ferguson argues that the play is funny because it is liberated from Ibsen's later famous preoccupation with the power of symbol and making every line relevant to the main issue. As Ferguson says,"This is Ibsen's most Holbergian play, a comedy on human weakness which does not, like some of his later plays on weakness, end in the punishment of the weak." [Ferguson, Robert, "Green in the Buttonhole, "The League of Youth", "Henrik Ibsen, A New Biography". Richard Cohen Books, London, 1996, 152.]

Resources

Further reading

Ferguson, Robert, Robert Ferguson "Green in the Buttonhole, "The League of Youth", "Henrik Ibsen, A New Biography". Richard Cohen Books, London, 1996, 147-167.

Koht, Halvdan. "The Life of Ibsen". translated by Ruth Lima McMahon and Hanna Astrup Larsen. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 1931.