Hedvig

For perhaps the most plausible reproach leveled at Ibsen by modern critics of his own school is just that survival of the old school in him which makes the death rate so high in his last acts.

Do Oswald Alving, Hedvig Ekdahl, Rosmer and Rebecca, Hedda Gabler, Stolness, Eyolf, Borkman, Rubek and Irene die dramatically natural deaths? Or are they slaughtered in the classic and Shakespearean manner, partly because the audience expects blood for its money, partly because it is difficult to make people attend seriously to anything except by startling them with some violent calamity? It is so easy to make out a case for either view that I shall not argue the point.

The post-Ibsen playwrights apparently think that Ibsen's homicides and suicides were forced.

In Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, for example, where the sentimental ideals of our amiable, cultured, Schumann-playing propertied class are reduced to dust and ashes by a hand not less deadly than Ibsen's because it is so much more caressing, nothing more violent happens than that the family cannot afford to keep up its old house.

Ibsen's dead bodies are those of the exhausted or destroyed.

He does not kill Hilda, for instance, as Shakespeare killed Juliet.

He is ruthless enough with Hedvig and Alf because he wants to use their deaths to expose their parents.

But if he had written Hamlet, nobody would have been killed in the last act except perhaps Horatio, whose correct nullity might have provoked Fortinbras to let some of the moral sawdust out of him with his sword.

That's very of the moment.

We've no Hedvig today, but replacing Hedvig is software engineer and author of a new book, Face with Tears of Joy, A Natural History of Emoji.

It's Keith Houston.

Hi, Keith.

I would have loved to have talked to Jennifer Daniel, who is the head of Unicode's Umoji subcommittee, and they're a current Google employee as well.

But I just could not get through to her at all, unfortunately.

I can feel the ghost of Hedvig, our absent co-host, knocking at the door.

She's long had this sort of working theory that the committee at Unicode sort of...