Issue #0

Four Major Plays: "Doll's House", "Ghosts", "Hedda Gabler" and "Master Builder" (World's Classics)

Plot

"The first play in this volume provoked such an uproar when it made its Scandinavian début that invitations to social gatherings would carry a postscript: 'You are requested not to mention Ibsen's "Doll House!"' In it, and in his next play, 'Ghosts, ' Ibsen brought to light things that a self-righteous, hypocritical society would have preferred to leave under the carpet: his heroines' perceptions about society and their position in it are conveyed with a clarity that is still shockingly dramatic. When, some years later, Ibsen came to write 'Hedda Gabler' and its successor, 'The Master Builder, ' his focus had shifted from the pressures exerted on women by society to the pressures individuals exerted on other individuals, in their urge to dominate and control one another. A contemporary reviewer claimed that 'Hedda's soul is a-crawl with the foulest passions of humanity.' That it is also possible to see her as a flawed idealist in an anguished private dilemma indicates how far Ibsen had brought dramatic prose towards the experession of a reality beneath the surface of words."