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Hjalmar Ekdal: *
The many lies are revealed in the play. These include: Gregers' father (Håkon Werle) may have impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child; Hjalmar's father (Old Ekdal), a one time successful hunter, has been disgraced & imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. The family exist by permitting each member to live in a dream world of his own: the feckless father Hjalmar believing himself to be a great inventor, the grandfather dwelling on the past when he was a mighty sportsman, and little Hedvig, the child, centring her emotional life on an attic where a wounded wild duck leads a crippled existence in a make-believe forest. Gregers insists on pursuing the absolute truth, producing disastrous results, one of which is the suicide of Hedvig.
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the Hamlet motive (inversion): *
Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834) produced an interpretation of Hamlet that evaluated his tragic state of mind & this interpretation proved influential with the Romantics. He depicted Hamlet's indecisiveness as resulting from an imbalance between the human attention to external objects, and inward thoughts, and thus suffered a paralysis of action because his faculty of vivid imagination overpowered his will and induced an aversion to actually enacting any measure Coleridge believed Shakespeare aimed to convey the basic message that man must act, and not be trammelled by excessive thinking that only leads to delay.
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Bayreuth: *
Wagner used the term Gesamtkunstwerk or "total artwork", in two 1849 essays, “Art and Revolution" and "The Artwork of the Future"; he speaks of his ideal of unifying all works of art via the theatre. He further elaborated on this theme in Opera and Drama (completed in 1851), describing in detail his idea of the union of opera & drama in which the individual arts are subordinated to a common purpose. His own opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, & specifically Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, represent the closest he came to realizing these ideals.