Ibsen and Copyright

Recently Arnie and I had the opportunity to see a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Almeida Theatre in London. The acting was superb, and our (last minute) seats in the second row made for an enthralling, if not relaxing, evening as we were entirely consumed by the cruelty and desperation of the characters. The London production was set in current times but otherwise adhered closely to the original.

I later learned that the ending of the Almedia production was not the one Ibsen originally wrote, and that copyright was the explanation for the difference. In 1879, when the play was written, there were no international copyright laws. Thus Ibsen’s plays were performed in other countries without payment to him. Moreover, the plays could be altered and he had no control over the alterations. To protect against others rewriting the then-controversial ending of A Doll’s House, Ibsen himself created an alternative ending. He also set up a network of publishers and theatrical agencies as his own royalty system.

A new study, Ibsen in Context, published in 2021, analyzes the impact of copyright on his work, stating:

There are many, many Ibsens. You have a German Ibsen tradition, a French Ibsen tradition, an English, an Italian, and so on. And the different conceptions of Ibsen around the world are, among other things, the result of a lack of copyright protection.

Ibsen became active in trying to secure royalties for authors, but did not push for adoption of the Berne Convention in Scandinavia, fearing that it would raise the cost of imported literature.

Today, the original work in Norwegian is in the public domain, but various translations and interpretations have copyright protection.