OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Four Major Plays

After the forced closing of the London theaters by the Puritans in 1642, serious drama in Europe entered a long decline. Despite occasional bright spots--French Neoclassicism, the German Enlightenment--it wasn't until the Victorian Era that a new style of realistic drama emerged, ironically, in Scandinavia and Russia, far from the traditional centers of European high culture. Beginning in 1850 Henrik Ibsen wrote a series of iconoclastic plays that challenged society's taboos and exposed its hypocrisy, while creating larger-than-life characters faced with agonizing ethical dilemmas. Like Shakespeare, Ibsen perhaps is better appreciated on the page than on the stage. With Ibsen, subtext is everything. Taken at face value, his plots can seem absurdly melodramatic, his characters unconvincing, his dialogue trite. You have to learn to read between the lines. Actors often flounder amid Ibsen's characters' nuances, while directors are more interested in making a statement than interpreting the author faithfully. "Hedda Gabler," the longest and most complicated play in this edition, in particular requires repeated readings. Its truly frightful heroine is a latter-day Medea or Lady Macbeth, who resorts to suicide when her nefarious schemes come to naught. "A Doll's House" and "Ghosts" both expose family secrets and hidden passions, while "The Master Builder" is a semiautobiographical tale of an aging artist whose fear of being supplanted by the younger generation leads to a disastrous flirtation with a young admirer who resembles nothing so much as an older Pippi Longstocking. Ibsen's dialogue is akin to the sticomathia of Greek tragedy, bristling with truly Sophoclean irony. If his plots lack Shakespeare's blood and thunder, his characters' inner turmoil is just as real. Sometimes they make the right decision, more often the wrong one, but with Ibsen it all boils down to personal accountability and taking responsibility for ones actions--or inactions. He demands high standards from both his characters and audience. The Oxford Ibsen translation by James McFarlane and Jens Arup is clear and readable. In "Hedda Gabler" they change the obtuse husband's catchphrase, usually translated as "Fancy that!" to "Just think of it!" This edition makes Ibsen as powerful and immediate as he was to his contemporaries.

Muy recomendable

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Four of Ibsen's greatest plays, taken from what is, in my opinion the best edition of Ibsen that we have had in our language, the Oxford Ibsen of James McFarlane et al. However, for this paperback reissue, some of the valuable appendices were removed. This is a shame but utterly justifiable. It does create a slight impression of incompetence, however, when, on p. 88, I read 'For an insight [...etc...] see his letters to a Copenhagen newspaper [...] (translated below, pp. 454–56)' and find that this book only has 355 pages. Regardless, four masterpieces in elegant and idiomatic translations, which make for intense literary pleasure; and the plays can be enjoyed perfectly well without the extra letters, &c. However, Oxford University Press, if you are reading this, it is virtually impossible for a young Ibsen-enthusiast to get hold of the Oxford Ibsen (or any complete Ibsen in English, for that matter) nowadays; so, perhaps the time has come to reissue all of his plays—perhaps more cost-effectively, in paperback (with appendices, preferably).

Very nice book.Just awesome.More than the expectation.Just loving it.Must buy it.