Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen

Informationen zum Autor Henrik Ibsen Klappentext Here, in a single volume, are four major plays by the first modern playwright, Henrick Ibsen. Ghosts-The startling portrayal of a family destroyed by disease and infidelity. The Wild Duck-A poignant drama of lost illusions. An Enemy Of The People-Ibsen's vigorous attack on public opinion. And A Doll's House-The play that scandalized the Victorian world with its unsparing views of love and marriage, featuring one of the most controversial heroines-and one of the most famous exists-in the literature of the stage.A DOLL'S HOUSE A Doll's House was not the first of Ibsen's plays to make enemies for him; but it was the first to spread his reputation as a subversive playwright abroad, and arouse enmity toward him in foreign lands. Ibsen's subject was no longer local politics, as in the earlier Love's Comedy , but the miseducation and subjugation of the European middle-class woman. It is difficult to overestimate the significance, and, indeed, the novelty of such a theme for Victorian readers and audiences. Although A Doll's House no longer arouses such burning topical interest, it remains a vital drama of character. Ibsen's strong-willed heroine, Nora, is no mere case history in a suffragette bill of particulars. Far from being a typical victim of male domination, Nora is master of the domestic world she calls her doll's house. She has the initiative to nurse her husband through a long illness, the courage to forge his name to a promissory note in order to get the money for his convalescence, and she is even able, in the face of enormous difficulties, to meet the payments on her loan. Only when a disgruntled employee of her husband's bank tries to blackmail Nora's husband into restoring him to the job from which he has been fired is Nora's deception revealed. The play's turning point is based far less on Nora's supposed innocence of the realities of the world than on her husband's understandable fear of scandal in their provincial bourgeois world. Because her notion that marriage could protect her from all eventualities is shattered, and because she had romantically expected heroic sacrifices from him, Nora resolves to find some basis for her marriage other than bourgeois convention and girlish romanticism: she decides to leave her "doll's house" to seek independence in the "outside world." Although her example might be cited as an object lesson by feminists, Ibsen took great pains to make her disenchantment and climactic decision the result of her unique personal character and experience. At the very end of the play Ibsen is forced to push his argument very hard to convince us that Nora really believes she can leave her young children behind when she deserts her husband. But precisely this drastic conclusion, no matter how it stretches credibility, has secured polemical importance for the play. As George Bernard Shaw concluded in The Quintessence of Ibsenism , the most original part of the play was the discussion Nora initiated once the threat of prosecution for forgery was completely removed by the blackmailer's repentance. In a conventional "well-made" drama, Torvald's eagerness to forget the entire unpleasant crisis would have been followed by a quick reconciliation and an unclouded denouement. In rejecting such a conventional climax, Ibsen was transcending Scribe and the nineteenth-century commercial theatre. At the same time, he was trying to ground his play in the psychological realities of human character, in the tradition of such great masters of nineteenth-century realism as Balzac, Flaubert and Turgenev, rather than in mere theatrical contrivance. Finally, Ibsen wanted to advance the cause of "the drama of ideas," which he had already begun to promote in such early, more romantic, plays as Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, and to root it firmly in the everyday social...

About the author

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born in 1828 into a prosperous family which quickly lost almost all of its resources. The subsequent despondency of his parents would later recur in Ibsen's plays, his parents serving as models of human wreckage. After a brief stint with the Norwegian Theater in Bergen, Ibsen moved to Oslo in 1857, married in 1859, and suffered through great financial hardship. Having received little recognition as a playwright, he began a 27-year expatriation in Italy in 1864. Brand(1865), published in Coppenhagen in 1866,was a success, as was Peer Gant(1867). Subsequent plays moved from social satire into a more experimental realm. A Doll's House (1879) and Ghosts (1881) aroused public outcry for their iconoclasm and An Enemy of the People (1882) dealt with the controversy. The Wild Duck(1884) introduced a new naturalistic style, later celebrated by Chekov. Despite his clashes with public opinion, Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891. He died in Oslo in 1906.

Product details

• Authors: Henrik Ibsen, Henrik Johan Ibsen
• Assisted by: R. Farquharson Sharp (Translation)
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.04.1984
• EAN: 9780553212808
• ISBN: 978-0-553-21280-8
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 170 mm x 21 mm
• Series: Bantam Classics; Bantam Classics
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature