Lady Inger of Ostrat

Lady Inger of Ostrat is an early play by Henrik Ibsen, written in 1855 and first performed the same year in Bergen, Norway, where Ibsen was working as the resident playwright at the city’s small theater. It is one of his earliest substantial dramatic works and one of his Norwegian historical plays, drawing on the dramatic possibilities of medieval and early modern Norwegian history.

The play is set in the mid sixteenth century at the castle of Österåt in northern Norway, the residence of Lady Inger, a powerful Norwegian noblewoman of the period of Danish rule over Norway. Lady Inger has been quietly involved across many years in efforts to secure Norwegian independence from Danish control, but her position is complicated by personal history, including the existence of an illegitimate son she gave birth to many years before and whose identity she has kept secret. The play works through the various political and personal complications that arise across a single night of dramatic activity at the castle, with messengers arriving from various quarters and with the long buried family secrets gradually emerging.

The play belongs to the period when Ibsen was still working within the conventions of the historical romantic drama that dominated Scandinavian theater in the mid nineteenth century. The verse is elevated, the plot turns on dramatic revelations and complicated political intrigue, and the characters speak in the kind of self consciously historical language that the genre required. Modern audiences accustomed to the radical Ibsen of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler often find the early historical plays surprising in their formal conservatism.

What the early plays show is Ibsen working his way toward the dramatic method that would eventually produce the great modern social plays of his later career. The interest in strong female protagonists facing impossible political and personal situations is already visible in Lady Inger herself, who is one of the more substantial roles Ibsen wrote for a woman before Nora and Hedda.

The play is best approached as a piece of historical interest rather than as one of his major works. It pairs naturally with his other early historical plays.