Introduction
Select Bibliography
Chronology of Henrik Ibsen
A Dolls House
Ghosts
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder
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Introduction
In an age when literature addressed itself to the debating of problems, Henrik Ibsen waited for question time and cast his dramas in an interrogative mould. I do but ask, he at one point insisted, my call is not to answer. In its totality his creative career fits almost exactly into the second half of the nineteenth century： his first prentice drama was published in the early spring of 1850, and his final dramatic epilogue appeared in the last December days of 1899. It is however from the second half of this career, and from the last quarter of the century, that the four plays in this volume are drawn. They form part of that incomparable series of twelve investigative dramas of contemporary life which filled these yearsa period of sustained creative endeavor unparalleled in the history of the modern theatre and one which gave a whole new impetus and direction to the drama of the twentieth century.
The series began in 1877 with the publication of Pillars of Society; and it was largely through its immediate and multiple translation into German and its rapid and sensational success in the German theatre that Ibsen began to reach out to a wider European public. But it was the next two plays in the seriesA Dolls House 1879 and Ghosts 1881which on their appearance and during the following years and decades were to bring the name of Ibsen inescapably to the attention of the world. The two plays belong inherently together. Indeed, not only did Ibsen himself define A Dolls House as an introduction and preparation for Ghosts but he also and more explicitly asserted that Ghosts had to be written. After Nora, Mrs. Alving had of necessity to come. Together these two plays provokes a storm of outraged controversy that penetrated far beyond the confines of the theatre proper into the leader columns of the Western press and the drawing rooms of polite society.
In much the same way that A Dolls House and Ghosts thus complement each other, so the other two plays in this volume?Hedda Gabler 1890 and The Master Builder 1892share a common dramatic purpose. As numbers eight and nine in the duodecimal series, they are similarly contiguous. Nevertheless in the intervening years between the two pairsyears in which there appeared An Enemy of the People 1882, The Wild Duck 1884, Rosmersholm 1886 and The Lady from the Sea 1888a distinct shift in the authors preoccupations is evident： from the social to the visionary, from the naturalistic to the symbolic, from the problematical to the psychological, from the demonstrative to the evocative. At the same time, this shift remains firmly located within one unifying progression; and it is useful to see the two pairs of plays as relating to each other in a way not dissimilar from the way the individual plays within the pair do. It is not without relevance in this respect that when in later life Ibsen wrote a brief preface to the collected edition of his works, he commended the whole corpus of his authorship as a continuing and cohesive whole.
Most of the work on A Dolls House was done while Ibsen was resident in Rome in 1879, though the final revisions to it were made while holidaying in Amalfi later that summer. A few notes and jottings from the previous autumn indicate that from the very first Ibsen was intent on writing a drama which would highlight the anomalous position of women in the prevailingly male-dominated society. A woman [he wrote] cannot be herself in contemporary society; it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view. In these notes he claimed to be able to identify two kinds of conscience, one in man and a completely different one in woman; and he pointed to the inevitable confusion over matters of right and wrong that inescapably follows when a woman is judged by mans law, and when in consequence her natural instincts are brought into conflict with the notions of authority she has grown up with.
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