Henrik Ibsen - Peer Gynt and Brand (The New Penguin Ibsen)

HENRIK IBSEN (18281906) is often called the Father of Modern Drama. He was born in the small Norwegian town of Skien and made his debut as a writer with the three-act play Catilina (1850). Between 1851 and 1864 he was artistic director and consultant for theatres in Bergen and Christiania (later spelled Kristiania; now Oslo), and contributed strongly to a renewal of Norwegian drama, writing plays such as The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), Loves Comedy (1862) and The Pretenders (1863). In 1864 he left Norway on a state travel stipend and went to Rome with his wife Suzannah. This marked the beginning of what would become a 27-year-long voluntary exile in Italy and Germany. Ibsen experienced a critical and commercial success with the verse drama Brand (1866); this was followed by his other great drama in verse, Peer Gynt (1867), the prose play The League of Youth (1869) and his colossal Emperor and Galilean (1873), a world-historical play, also in prose.

The next decisive turn in Ibsens career came with Pillars of the Community (1877), the beginning of the twelve-play cycle of modern prose plays. Here he turned his attention to contemporary bourgeois life, rejecting verse for good. This cycle would include A Dolls 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, finally, When We Dead Awaken (1899). By the time Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, he had acquired Europe-wide fame, and his plays soon entered the canons of world literature and drama. Following a series of strokes, he died at home in Kristiania at the age of seventy-eight. GEOFFREY HILL , the son of a police constable, was born in Worcestershire in 1932.

He was educated at Bromsgrove County High School and at Keble College, Oxford. After teaching for more than thirty years in England, first at Leeds and subsequently at Cambridge, he became Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University in Massachusetts, where he was also founding co-director of the Editorial Institute. In 2010 he was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and in 2012 he was knighted. His collection Broken Hierarchies: Poems 19522012 was published in 2014. JANET GARTON is Emeritus Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She has published a number of books on Scandinavian literature, including Norwegian Womens Writing (1993), the edited letters of Amalie and Erik Skram (3 vols., 2002) and a biography of Amalie Skram, Amalie et forfatterliv (2011).

She is a director of Norvik Press and has translated several works of Norwegian and Danish literature, including Knut Faldbakken: The Sleeping Prince (1988), Bjrg Vik: An Aquarium of Women (1987), Kirsten Thorup: The God of Chance (2013) and Johan Borgen: Little Lord (forthcoming). TORE REM is Professor of British Literature at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, the University of Oslo. He has published extensively on British and Scandinavian nineteenth-century literature and drama, including the books Dickens, Melodrama and the Parodic Imagination (2002) and Henry Gibson/Henrik Ibsen (2006), as well as on life writing, the history of the book, reception studies and world literature. Rem has been Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherines College, Oxford, was director of the board of the Centre for Ibsen Studies and is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

This Penguin edition of Peer Gynt is the first English-language edition based on the new historical-critical edition of Henrik Ibsens work, Henrik Ibsens Skrifter ( 200510 ) (HIS). The digital edition (HISe) is available at http://www.ibsen.uio.no/forside.xhtml.

The texts of HIS are based on Ibsens first editions.

The series of twelve prose dramas for which Ibsen is generally known outside Norway were all written quite late in his life, from 1877 (Pillars of the Community) to 1899 (When We Dead Awaken). By 1877 he was forty-nine years old and already had over half of his literary production behind him; his first play, Catilina, was published in 1850, and he went on to publish a further fourteen plays as well as a volume of poetry over the following twenty-five years. It was during this period that he acquired the skills of writing for the stage which he was to use with such assurance in his mature works. By the time he published Brand and Peer Gynt, in 1866 and 1867 respectively, he had written and seen staged several of his own plays. Henrik Ibsen had an inauspicious beginning as a writer; the son of a bankrupt father, he had left school at fifteen to start work as an apothecarys apprentice.

Largely self-taught, he failed his university entrance exams, but persevered in writing plays and managed to attract the attention of the new Norwegian Theatre in Bergen, which had been set up by the world-famous violinist and entrepreneur Ole Bull. Here Ibsen was appointed dramatic author in 1851, a post he held for six years; this was followed by five years at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania (Oslo). During this time it was his responsibility to write plays for performance at the two theatres, as well as directing plays by other authors. In the tradition of the time, his plays were written largely in verse, and in line with the National Romantic ideals fostered by the growing movement for independence they often took their inspiration from earlier Norwegian history, such as Lady Inger of Ostrat (1855), about sixteenth-century Dano-Norwegian dynastic battles, and The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), which dramatized the tenth-century conflict between the warriors Sigurd and Gunnar and their ill-matched wives Dagny and Hjrdis. The plays he was directing were often foreign ones imported as light entertainment, largely French comedies by dramatists such as Eugne Scribe or Danish ones by Ludvig Holberg, from which he learned much about the techniques of stagecraft. His tenure as contracted dramatic author and theatre director was not a happy one, however; his own plays had variable success, and he was not gifted as an entrepreneur or as an administrator.

In Christiania things went from bad to worse, as the theatres finances became precarious. Ibsen was attacked in the press for his bad management and reacted with apathy; his productions failed to arouse any interest, and for a few years he found himself unable to write any more plays. To some extent he was also a scapegoat for the theatre boards extravagance in incurring debts for a programme of rebuilding which far exceeded the theatres income. The final result was that the theatre went bankrupt in June 1862, and Ibsen was fired. For the next couple of years he had no regular income. He applied to the government for an annual stipend as an author and was refused, although the only other two applicants, his friend and dramatic rival Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson and the poet Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, were awarded grants.