Four Major Plays: Volume I
A Doll House • The Wild Duck • Hedda Gabler • The Master Builder
Among the greatest and best known of Ibsen's works, these four plays brilliantly exemplify his landmark contributions to the theater: his realistic dialogue, probing of social problems, and depiction of characters' inner lives as well as their actions. Rich in symbolism and often autobiographical, each of these dramas deals convincingly and provocatively with such universal themes as greed, fear, and sexual hostility, and confronts the eternal conflict between reality and illusion. These Rolf Fjelde translations have been widely acclaimed as the definitive versions of the major works of the father of modern theater.
Translated and with a Foreword by Rolf Fjelde
And an Afterword by Joan Templeton
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is one of the greatest dramatists of world literature. His verse dramas Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867) brought him fame in Scandinavia, but he became known throughout the world with twelve prose plays in which he invented what is known as theatrical realism: Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899). Ibsen made ordinary people, talking about contemporary things in everyday language, proper subjects for the stage, and in so doing earned the title "the father of modern drama.” Ibsen is the second-most widely produced dramatist in the world after Shakespeare.
Show moreFour Major Plays: Volume I
A Doll House • The Wild Duck • Hedda Gabler • The Master Builder
Among the greatest and best known of Ibsen's works, these four plays brilliantly exemplify his landmark contributions to the theater: his realistic dialogue, probing of social problems, and depiction of characters' inner lives as well as their actions. Rich in symbolism and often autobiographical, each of these dramas deals convincingly and provocatively with such universal themes as greed, fear, and sexual hostility, and confronts the eternal conflict between reality and illusion. These Rolf Fjelde translations have been widely acclaimed as the definitive versions of the major works of the father of modern theater.
Translated and with a Foreword by Rolf Fjelde
And an Afterword by Joan Templeton
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is one of the greatest dramatists of world literature. His verse dramas Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867) brought him fame in Scandinavia, but he became known throughout the world with twelve prose plays in which he invented what is known as theatrical realism: Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899). Ibsen made ordinary people, talking about contemporary things in everyday language, proper subjects for the stage, and in so doing earned the title "the father of modern drama.” Ibsen is the second-most widely produced dramatist in the world after Shakespeare.
Show moreHenrik Ibsen was born of well-to-do parents at Skien, a small
Norwegian coastal town, on March 20, 1828. In 1836 his father went
bankrupt, and the family was reduced to near poverty. At the age of
fifteen, he was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad. In 1850
Ibsen ventured to Christiania-present-day Oslo-as a student, with
the hope of becoming a doctor. On the strength of his first two
plays he was appointed 'theater-poet' to the new Bergen National
Theater, where he wrote five conventional romantic and historical
dramas and absorbed the elements of his craft.
In 1857 he was called to the directorship of the financially
unsound Christiania Norwegian Theater, which failed in 1862. In
1864, exhausted and enraged by the frustration of his efforts
toward a national drama and theater, he quit Norway for what became
twenty-seven years of voluntary exile abroad. In Italy he wrote the
volcanic Brand (1866), which made his reputation and secured him a
poet's stipend from the government. Its companion piece, the
phantasmagoric Peer Gynt, followed in 1867, then the immense double
play, Emperor and Galilean (1873), expressing his philosophy of
civilization.
Meanwhile, having moved to Germany, Ibsen had been searching for a
new style. With The Pillars of Society he found it; this became the
first of twelve plays, appearing at two-year intervals, that
confirmed his international standing as the foremost dramatist of
his age. In 1900 Ibsen suffered the first of several strokes that
incapacitated him. He died in Oslo on May 23, 1906.
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