CLASSICSTHE MASTER BUILDER 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 The Pillars of Society (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.
BARBARA J. HAVELAND is a freelance literary translator. She translates fiction, poetry and drama from Norwegian and Danish to English. She has translated novels by many leading Danish and Norwegian writers, including Peter Høeg, Ib Michael, Jens Christian Grøndahl, Øystein Lønn, Jan Kjærstad and Linn Ullmann. On the poetry side, she has been involved in collaborations with such Danish poets as Pia Juul, Morten Søndergaard and Ursula Andkjær Olsen. She has also produced English translations of two other works by Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Enemy of the People, for the ‘Ibsen in Translation’ project run by The Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo.
ANNE-MARIE STANTON-IFE read Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Newnham College, Cambridge and subsequently studied at University College London, gaining an MA in Comparative Literature and a PhD on Henrik Ibsen, supported by a period of research at the University of Oslo Centre for Ibsen Studies. She has published a number of articles on Ibsen, with a focus on the tragedies, and co-translated Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean (with Marie Wells) for the National Theatre. Other translations include Hans Frederik Dahl’s biography of Vidkun Quisling from the Norwegian (CUP, 1998) and several dramatic and prose works from the Modern Greek.
TORIL MOI is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Theater Studies and Philosophy at Duke University. Among her books are Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985); Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1993; 2nd edn 2008); Sex, Gender and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman? (2005) and Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (2006).
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.