Peer Gynt figure quite so exuberant, outrageous, vitalistic as Peer Gynt. He merely "seems" initially to be an unlikely candidate for such eminence: "What is he", we say, "except a kind of Norwegian roaring boy?" – marvelously attractive to women, a kind of bogus poet, a narcissist, absurd self-idolator, a liar, seducer, bombastic self-deceiver. But this is paltry moralizing – all too much like the scholarly chorus that rants against Falstaff. True, Peer, unlike Falstaff, is not a great wit. But in the Yahwistic, biblical sense, Peer the scamp bears the blessing: More life. On 5 January 1867 Ibsen wrote to Frederik
Peer Gynt Hegel, his publisher, with his plan for the play: it would be "a long dramatic poem, having as its principal a part-legendary, part-fictional character from Norwegian folklore during "recent" times. It will bear no resemblance to "Brand", and will contain no direct polemics or anything of that kind." He began to write "Peer Gynt" on 14 January, employing a far greater variety of metres in its rhymed verse than he had used in his previous verse plays "Brand" (written 1865) or "Love's Comedy" (written 1862). The first two acts were completed in Rome and the third in Casamicciola on the