Four Major Plays: v. 2 (Signet Classical Books) - Softcover

Ibsen, Henrik

9780451000866: Four Major Plays: v. 2 (Signet Classical Books)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451000862 ISBN 13: 9780451000866

Publisher: New American Library, 1970

This specific ISBN edition is currently not available.

Second only to Shakespeare as the most staged dramatist in history, Ibsen's still-timely "revolutions of the human mind" continue to resonate with students, teachers, and actors. These four classic plays cover such taboo-breaking but timely themes as family guilt, social hypocrisy, and sexual mores.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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 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.