9780553212808 | 055321280X "Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen" by Ibsen, Henrik, Adams Book Company

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Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen

Author(s): Ibsen, Henrik

List Price: $6.95

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Imprint: Bantam Classics

ISBN: 055321280X or 9780553212808

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Descriptions and Reviews

	Here, in a single volume, are four major plays by ...
	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.>hr 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.>hr 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 and domestic middle-class world of Europe. That Ibsen himself seems to have been uncertain about the validity of his unconventional climax was revealed when he permitted a German production of A Doll's House to revise the ending and to show Nora remaining with her husband. A Doll's House was completed and published late in 1879. It was so successful that it had to be reprinted twice within three months of publication. Translations followed in German, Finnish, English, Polish, Russian and Italian. The play was successfully presented in Copenhagen in the same year of publication, and then in Stockholm and Christiania (Oslo). In March of the same year the play had its German premiere in Munich. The first public production in England was entitled Breaking a Butterfly, and was presented in London in March 1884. According to Ibsen's early advocate and translator, William Archer, this severely mangled adaptation presented the husband as "an ideal hero, instead of the sensual, self-righteous weakling of Ibsen." The first acceptable British production, which starred Janet Achurch, came much later, in June 1889. It was repeated by the same actress in 1892. The first American production was presented in Milwaukee in 1882 in an adaptation entitled The Child Wife. Not until 1889 did Americans see an unadulterated version of the play. Ultimately, with the exception of Ghosts, Ibsen's A Doll's House became the most frequently performed of his plays in England and the United States. DRAMATIS PERSON® Torvald Helmer. Nora, his wife. Doctor Rank. Mrs. Linde. Nils Krogstad. Helmer's three young children. Anne, their nurse. A Housemaid. A Porter. (The action takes place in Helmer's house.) ACT I (scene.--A room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly. At the back, a door to the r

Other Books by this Author

An Enemy of the People; by Ibsen, Henrik; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

An Enemy of the People; by Ibsen, Henrik; Ivan R Dee

An Enemy of the People; by Ibsen, Henrik; Theatre Communications Group, Nick Hern Books

An Enemy of the People; by Ibsen, Henrik; Dover Publications, Dover Publications

An Enemy of the People; The Wild Duck; Rosmersholm; by Ibsen, Henrik; Oxford University Press, Oxford University Press

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