PENGUIN CLASSICS

A DOLL’S HOUSE AND OTHER PLAYS

HENRIK IBSEN (1828–1906) is often called ‘the Father of Modern Drama’. He was born in the small Norwegian town of Skien and made his debut as a writer with the three-act play Catilina (1850). Between 1851 and 1864 he was artistic director and consultant for theatres in Bergen and Christiania (later spelt Kristiania; now Oslo), and contributed strongly to a renewal of Norwegian drama, writing plays such as The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), Love’s Comedy (1862) and The Pretenders (1863). In 1864 he left Norway on a state travel stipend and went to Rome with his wife Suzannah. This marked the beginning of what would become a 27-year-long voluntary exile in Italy and Germany. Ibsen experienced a critical and commercial success with the verse drama Brand (1866); this was followed by his other great drama in verse, Peer Gynt (1867), the prose play The League of Youth (1869) and his colossal Emperor and Galilean (1873), a ‘world-historical play’, also in prose. The next decisive turn in Ibsen’s career came with Pillars of the Community (1877), the beginning of the twelve-play cycle of modern prose plays. Here he turned his attention to contemporary bourgeois life, rejecting verse for good. This cycle would include A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and, finally, When We Dead Awaken (1899). By the time Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, he had acquired Europe-wide fame, and his plays soon entered the canons of world literature and drama. Following a series of strokes, he died at home in Kristiania at the age of seventy-eight.

DEBORAH DAWKIN originally trained and worked as an actress and theatre director for ten years. She has worked as a translator from Norwegian to English for ten years in collaboration with Erik Skuggevik and independently, translating novels, short stories, cartoons, poetry and non-fiction. Her translation of Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? (2011) was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, 2012. With a particular interest in translation history, Deborah currently holds a Collaborative Doctoral Award with University College London and the British Library, researching the life and work of Ibsen translator Michael Meyer.

ERIK SKUGGEVIK has a background in theatre. He has worked as a translator from Norwegian to English for fifteen years. In collaboration with Deborah Dawkin, he has translated novels by Ketil Bjørnstad and Lars Ramslie and, over many years, the cartoon strip Nemi, as well as non-fiction works by Ingar Sletten Kolloen and Petter Aaslestad. He has been a lecturer in both Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication at the University of Surrey as well as a Norwegian teacher at University College London and the University of Oslo. He currently lectures in Interpreting Studies at Oslo University College.

TORE REM is Professor of British Literature at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, the University of Oslo. He has published extensively on British and Scandinavian nineteenth-century literature and drama, including the books Dickens, Melodrama and the Parodic Imagination (2002) and Henry Gibson/Henrik Ibsen (2006), as well as on life writing, the history of the book, reception studies and world literature. Rem has been Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, was director of the board of the Centre for Ibsen Studies and is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.