PENGUIN CLASSICS

PEER GYNT AND BRAND

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 spelled 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.

GEOFFREY HILL, the son of a police constable, was born in Worcestershire in 1932. He was educated at Bromsgrove County High School and at Keble College, Oxford. After teaching for more than thirty years in England, first at Leeds and subsequently at Cambridge, he became Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University in Massachusetts, where he was also founding co-director of the Editorial Institute. In 2010 he was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and in 2012 he was knighted. His collection Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012 was published in 2014.

JANET GARTON is Emeritus Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She has published a number of books on Scandinavian literature, including Norwegian Women’s Writing (1993), the edited letters of Amalie and Erik Skram (3 vols., 2002) and a biography of Amalie Skram, Amalie – et forfatterliv (2011). She is a director of Norvik Press and has translated several works of Norwegian and Danish literature, including Knut Faldbakken: The Sleeping Prince (1988), Bjørg Vik: An Aquarium of Women (1987), Kirsten Thorup: The God of Chance (2013) and Johan Borgen: Little Lord (forthcoming).

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.