Four Major Plays, Vol. 1 (A Doll House / The Wild Duck / Hedda Gabler / The Master Builder) - Softcover

Ibsen, Henrik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451524063 ISBN 13: 9780451524065

Publisher: Signet Classics, 1965

Synopsis

Among the greatest and best known of Ibsen's works, these four plays--A Doll's House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder--brilliantly embody his landmark contributions to the theater. Rich in symbolism and often autobiographical, each work deals convincingly with the human emotions of greed, fear, and sexual hostility, and confronts the external conflicts between reality and illusion. Reissue.

About this title

About the Author

Henrik 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 Christianiapresent-day Osloas 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 poets 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Signet Classics
• Publication date: 1965
• ISBN 10: 0451524063
• ISBN 13: 9780451524065
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 384