Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen
Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Henrik Ibsen's mighty epic, by turns fantastic and tragic, based on the Norwegian fairy tale Per Gynt. Ibsen's play, his last to be written in verse, follows the poet and braggart Peer Gynt as, fleeing disgrace, he swaggers and seduces his way from the fjords of Norway to the deserts of Africa and back. Peer Gynt was originally published in 1867, and first performed in Christiania (Oslo) in 1876. This English version, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish.
Born in Norway in 1828, Ibsen began his writing career with romantic history plays influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller. In 1851 he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly established Norwegian Theatre in Bergen with a contract to write a play a year for five years, following which he was made Artistic Director of the Norwegian Theatre in what is now Oslo. In the 1860s he moved abroad to concentrate wholly on writing. He began with two mighty verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, and in the 1870s and 1880s wrote the sequence of realistic ‘problem’ plays for which he is best known, among them A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm. His last four plays, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, dating from his return to Norway in the 1890s, are increasingly overlaid with symbolism. Illness forced him to retire in 1900, and he died in 1906 after a series of crippling strokes. Kenneth McLeish was the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain and, until his early death in 1997, edited the NHB Drama Classics series.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781854594358 |
| ISBN 10 | 1854594354 |
| Title | Peer Gynt |
| Author | Henrik Ibsen |
| Series | Drama Classics |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Nick Hern Books |
| Year published | 1999-11-01 |
| Number of pages | 130 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |