VD as a subject for literature seems to have become submerged under a lid of polite and informal but none the less effective censorship. It seems possible that pressure was building up under the lid, and that eventually it reached an intolerable level. Perhaps some such process can explain Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, which did in fact burst upon the world with the force of an explosion.

It is recognized that all over Europe, except in Russia, the theater during the nineteenth century, before Ibsen's time, had gone through a period of decline. In part this is blamed on a playwright named Eugene Scribe (1791 1861), whose theory of the "well made play" seems to have encouraged stilted and formal romanticism. In Russia a tradition of realism was unbroken from Aleksander Pushkin (1799 1837) through Nikolai Gogol (1809 1852) and Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1833 1886) to Anton Chekhov (1860 1904) and the dramatic theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863 1938). But the earlier figures had little influence on the rest of Europe until a good deal later; and Chekhov was himself influenced by Ibsen. Even so, Ibsen's contemporary, Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832 1910), made a sensation all over Europe with his realistic play A Failure (1874) five years before A Doll’s House. Ibsen is said also to have been influenced by his contemporary, August Strindberg. Nevertheless when Nora slammed the door on her marriage the sound reverberated like a punctuation mark in the history of the theater. But it was not the death knell of Victorianism; the patient is still alive.

Ibsen's Ghosts came quickly on the heels of A Doll’s House. We must speak of it for its general influence on the prudery of the age as well as for its more immediate effect to us of reopening the question of syphilis to the literate public view.. Ghosts is less popular than some of Ibsen's other plays, but it is still viable. It is put on fairly often, especially by college groups, and its text is easily available in many different editions. It hardly needs a stamp of approval from me. It is a play of shattering impact, as a well told ghost story ought to be; yet Ibsen is said to have disapproved of the name Ghosts, which was given to it by its first English translator, William Archer. In the original Norwegian the name means, roughly, "Those who walk again"; it is better translated by the French, "Les Re-enacts." (see VENEREAL DISEASES AS A SUBJECT FOR LITERATURE PART II)