HEDDA GABLER AND OTHER PLAYS
HENRIK IBSEN was born at Skien, Norway, in 1828. His family went bankrupt when he was a child, and he struggled with poverty for many years. His first ambition was medicine, but he abandoned this to write and to work in the theatre. Of his early verse plays, The Vikings at Helgeland is now best remembered. In the year of its publication (1858) he married Susannah Thoresen, a pastor’s daughter.
A scholarship enabled Ibsen to travel to Rome in 1864. In Italy he wrote Brand (1866), which earned him a state pension, and Peer Gynt (1867), for which Grieg later wrote the incidental music. These plays established his reputation. Apart from two short visits to Norway, he lived in Italy and Germany until 1891.
From The League of Youth (1869) onwards, Ibsen renounced poetry and wrote prose drama. Though a timid man, he supported in his plays many crucial causes of his day, such as the emancipation of women. Plays like Ghosts (1881) and A Doll’s House (1879) caused critical uproar. Other plays included The Pillars of the Community, The Wild Duck, The Lady From the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkmann and When We Dead Wake.
Towards the end of his life Ibsen, one of the world’s greatest dramatists, suffered strokes which destroyed his memory for words and even the alphabet. He died in 1906 in Kristiania (now Oslo).
UNA ELLIS-FERMOR was Professor of English at Bedford College, University of London until her death in 1958. She also translated The Master Builder, Rosmerholm, Little Eyolf and John Gabriel Borkman, which are published together in another volume of the Penguin Classics.
