Like most of the great writers over there, Hamsun has not confined
himself to one poetic mood or form, but has tried all of them. From the
line of novels culminating in "Pan," he turned suddenly to the drama,
and in 1895 appeared his first play, "At the Gates of the Kingdom." It
was the opening drama of a trilogy and was followed by "The Game of
Life" in 1896 and "Sunset Glow" in 1898. The first play is laid in
Christiania, the second in the Northland, and the third in Christiania
again. The hero of all three is Ivar Kareno, a student and thinker who
is first presented to us at the age of 29, then at 39, and finally at
50. His wife and several other characters accompany the central figure
through the trilogy, of which the lesson seems to be that every one is
a rebel at 30 and a renegade at 50. But when Kareno, the irreconcilable
rebel of "At the Gates of the Kingdom," the heaven-storming truth-seeker
of "The Game of Life," and the acclaimed radical leader in the first
acts of "Sunset Glow," surrenders at last to the powers that be in order
to gain a safe and sheltered harbor for his declining years, then
another man of 29 stands ready to denounce him and to take up the rebel
cry of youth to which he has become a traitor. Hamsun's ironical humor
and whimsical manner of expression do more than the plot itself to knit
the plays into an organic unit, and several of the characters are
delightfully drawn, particularly the two women who play the greatest
part in Kareno's life: his wife Eline, and Teresita, who is one more
of his many feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable
Northland nature. Any attempt to give a political tendency to the
trilogy must be held wasted. Characteristically, Kareno is a sort of
Nietzschean rebel against the victorious majority, and Hamsun's
seemingly cynical conclusions stress man's capacity for action
rather than the purposes toward which that capacity may be directed.

Of three subsequent plays, "Vendt the Monk," (1903), "Queen Tamara"