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  • Published: 19 November 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141194592
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

The Master Builder and Other Plays




Ibsen's greatest late plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series

This volume includes The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken - Ibsen's last four plays, written when he was an old man and had recently returned to Oslo after decades of self-imposed exile. In The Master Builder, a married, middle-aged architect whose best years are behind him becomes bewitched by a strange young woman who claims to have known him for years. The sudden death of a child in Little Eyolf is the catalyst that drives his parents into a greater understanding of themselves and their flawed marriage. In John Gabriel Borkman, a banker recently released from prison must choose between his wife and her sister, his first true love. And in When We Dead Awaken, a sculptor on holiday with his wife is reunited with his first love - the woman who inspired his greatest art.

  • Published: 19 November 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141194592
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Henrik Ibsen

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.

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