Four Major Plays, Volume I

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is one of the greatest dramatists of world literature. His verse dramas Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867) brought him fame in Scandinavia, but he became known throughout the world with twelve prose plays in which he invented what is known as theatrical realism: Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll 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 When We Dead Awaken (1899). Ibsen made ordinary people, talking about contemporary things in everyday language, proper subjects for the stage, and in so doing earned the title "the father of modern drama. ” Ibsen is the second-most widely produced dramatist in the world after Shakespeare.