Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen's creation of "modern theater" makes him one of the most influential playwrights, along with William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, in the history of drama. This unique collection of the four plays he wrote between 1879 and 1884 provides teachers of drama/literature with an opportunity to look at a major writer trying to develop his craft. Ibsen is concerned with social criticism and each of these plays reflects his change in perspective as he tries to write a drama that will be both socially relevant and commercially successful. You have to remember the time and place that considered it shocking for Nora to leave her husband or for Mrs. Alving to consider euthenasia for her son. By turning to "comedy" (of a sort) in "An Enemy of the People," Ibsen found a way of making his point in a manner more acceptable to his audiences. By looking at not only the plays but how each was received by the public, teachers/students can better appreciate what Ibsen was trying to do with each successive play. For all four of these plays the notion of responsibility is primary. In "A Doll's House" Nora Helmer decides to leave her husband because he is unworthy of her love. In "Ghosts," Mrs. Alving has to decide whether she should give her diseased son poison as a mercy killing. In "An Enemy of the People," Dr. Stockmann decides to stay and fight to have the infected baths repaired even after the town ostracizes him. Finally, in "The Wild Duck" the idealist Gregers Werle comes home and destroys a family by insisting the truth be told. A classroom set of this particular volume is relatively inexpensive and provides an excellent case study of the growth of a major writer. Students do not often get the opportunity to read several works by the same writer. Shakespeare is the exception to this rule, but usually students are exposed to different types of plays (comedy, tragedy, history) rather than to a series of consecutively written plays.

henrik ibsen has perfected the realist movement in theatre. he has accomplished what so few have: to maintain the realistic effect, without succumbing to the tediousness of every day life. his plays ring true for the common man, yet not in a pedestrian manner that becomes boring. in my opinion, he far surpasses any other playwright in the realist movement, including chekhov.

So much in reading Ibsen depends upon the translation of these great works. These four plays of Ibsen's so-called "realistic period" revolve around social issues of his day which plague us 100 years later. Do we ever learn from such literary wake-up calls? Although the dramatic tensions here, which could have easily have been 20th Century tensions, rumble through these plays, the translations here are wordy and dated, thus making the plays sound overly melodramatic and at times downright silly. Still, everyone should read -- and discuss -- Ibsen's plays for their uneasy questions regarding universal social problems: money, privacy, freedom to act, government corruption, unchecked journalism, and the moral and physical diseases which only seem to wear a new face each year.