A magnificent new biography of Henrik Ibsen, among the greatest of modern playwrights Henrik Ibsen (1820–1908) is arguably the most important playwright of the nineteenth century. Globally he remains the most performed playwright after Shakespeare, and Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, and Ghosts are all masterpieces of psychological insight. This is the first full-scale biography to take a literary as well as historical approach to the works, life, and times of Ibsen. Ivo de Figueiredo shows how, as a man, Ibsen was drawn toward authoritarianism, was absolute in his judgments over others, and resisted the ideas of equality and human rights that formed the bases of the emerging democracies in Europe. And yet as an artist, he advanced debates about the modern individual’s freedom and responsibility—and cultivated his own image accordingly. Where other biographies try to show how the artist creates the art, this book reveals how, in Ibsen’s case, the art shaped the artist.

Love's Comedy

Henrik Ibsen, the 'Father of Modern Drama', came from a seemingly inauspicious background. What are the key contexts for understanding his appearance on the world stage? This collection provides thirty contributions from leading scholars in theatre studies, literary studies, book history, philosophy, music, and history, offering a rich interdisciplinary understanding of Ibsen's work, with chapters ranging across cultural and aesthetic contexts including feminism, scientific discovery, genre, publishing, music, and the visual arts. The book ends by charting Ibsen's ongoing globalization and gives valuable overviews of major trends within Ibsen studies. Accessibly written, while drawing on the most recent scholarship, Ibsen in Context provides unique access to Ibsen the man, his works, and their afterlives across the world.

Love's Comedy A Play in Three Acts Henrik Ibsen Translated by C. H. Herford Classic Drama Love's Comedy is a comedy by Henrik Ibsen. It was first published on 31 December 1862. As a result of being branded an "immoral" work in the press, the Christiania Theatre would not dare to stage it at first. "The play aroused a storm of hostility," Ibsen wrote in its preface three years later, "more violent and more widespread than most books could boast of having evoked in a community the vast majority of whose members commonly regard matters of literature as being of small concern." Two students - Falk and Lind - are staying at the country house of Mrs. Halm, romancing her two daughters Anna and Svanhild. Lind has ambitions to be a missionary, Falk a great poet. Falk criticises bourgeois society in his verse and insists that we live in the passionate moment. Lind's proposal of marriage to Anna is accepted, but Svanhild rejects the chance to become Falk's muse, as poetry is merely writing, and he can do that on his own and without really risking himself for his beliefs. Falk is liberated by his words and decides to put ideas into action. When Lind is persuaded by Anna's friends not to leave as a missionary but stay in a cosy existence looking after his wife, Falk denounces the lot of them - saying that their marriages have nothing to do with love. Society is outraged and does not wish to be reminded of the split between ideal and reality. Falk is ostracized but Svanhild admires his courage. They plan to run off together and live the ideal.

Land locked. Sea free. Beyond the walls of her fjord home, where her husband Dr Wangel offers the security of family and responsibility, Ellida is constantly drawn towards the sea, It is from this element that her past love returns – promising the ecstasy of the unknown. Will she suffocate on dry land, or find freedom across the sea? The Lady From The Sea (1888) marked a turning-point in Ibsen’s writing career as it, and the plays that followed it, concerned itself more with individual destinies than with general moral or social principles. In this new translation, premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre, Pam Gems gives this classic drama a refreshing new life. Pam Gems new version of Ibsen’s lyrical masterpiece premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London in 2003.

"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner) The plays shine freshly from the pages ...This will be our definitive Ibsen." (JC Trewin) This volume contains Ibsen's first great modern prose play and his two last symbolic dramas. The Pillars of Society, written between 1875 and 1877, exhibits many of the classic elements which recur in the subsequent plays - a marriage founded on a lie, women stunted by social conventions, an arrogant man destroying the happiness of those around him. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), according to Edvard Munch, is "the most powerful winter landscape in Scandinavian art"; and Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), also dealing with "the coldness of heart", showed, said Bernard Shaw, "no decay of Ibsen's highest qualities. His magic is nowhere more potent.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)