Four Major Plays Vol.2

Author: Henrik Ibsen Series: Signet Classics (Hardcover)

Paperback

Four of Ibsen's plays centering upon personal awakening and inner transformation through confrontations with family guilt, social hypocrisy, conventional and sexual morality, and the materialistic bourgeois ethic are collected in this second volume of his major plays. Includes "Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Lady from the Sea", and "John Gabriel Borkman". Also includes a new afterword.

New

$29.12

Or pay later with

Free 30 day returns Secure transaction

Check delivery options

Paperback

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Description

The foremost dramatist of his age, Ibsen changed theatre forever with his realistic dialogue and depiction of contemporary social problems. Here are four of his greatest works- Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Lady From the Sea, and John Gabriel Borkman.

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 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.