Four Major Plays: Volume 1

I intend only to review one play of these four, An Enemy of the People. As for the Signet editions and their translations, well, in terms of paper and print, you get what you pay for. You can carry them in your jeans pocket, but don't wait too long to read them, lest the paper yellows and crumbles in your fingers. An Enemy of the People is Ibsen's most explicitly political play, and the one that critics refer to most often when attempting to pin down the playwright's political stance. The fourth act of the drama consists chiefly of Doctor Stockman's spontaneous ranting and raving against the tyranny of the majority - the democratic mass of ignorant and short-sighted ordinary people who have failed to accept his advice. "The majority is never right!" he declares; "That's one of those social lies that any free man who thinks for himself has to rebel against.... all over this whole wide earth, the stupid are in a fearsomely overpowering majority..... The right is with me, and the other few, the solitary individuals. The minority is always right." Later in his tirade, he continues: "I'm thinking of the few, the individuals among us, who've mastered all the new truths that have been germinating. Those men are out there holding their positions like outposts, so far in the vanguard that the solid majority hasn't even begun to catch up..." Such anti-democratic, anti-liberal declarations have earned Ibsen a reputation among some critics of being a prophet of fascism -- he was in fact Hitler's favorite playwright -- but a careful comparison will show that Doctor Stockman sounds a good deal more like a character in an Ayn Rand novel than like the 'hero' of Mein Kampf. Listen to Stockman's last words, at the end of act five, standing in the middle of his vandalized clinic and confronted a ruined career: "I've made a great discovery!... the strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone!" Recent audiences seem disposed to take Stockman at his own estimation. The BBC adaptation of Enemy transposes the danger to the community that Stockman has discovered from sewage contamination of the Spa to chemical pollution, and portrays Stockman as a staunch monitor against environmental catastrophe. It would, I think, be quite easy to rewrite Ibsen's play as an outcry of alarm against the deniers of global warming. But frankly, I don't think Ibsen had anything so obvious and unambiguous in mind. Perhaps I'm just reluctant to accept the idea that a great playwright could be a total fool. The play is clearly not about pollution, but about the 'balance' of values between the exceptional individual and the ordinary throng. Doctor Stockman, by his own evaluation, is the exceptional individual, and for the moment at least the embodiment of the "prophet without honor in his own country." However, the play is rife with clues that we the audience are not required to accept Stockman's self-assessment. First, of course, any rash madman can proclaim himself a gen

Four Major Plays, Volume I (Signet Classics) An Enemy of the People Dr Stockman: "The whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulcher. I tell you - the gravest possible danger to public health! All the nastiness up at Mollidol, all that stinking filth, is infecting the water in the conduit pipes leading to the Reservoir. (Pointing to letter) Here it is! It proves the presence of decaying organic matter in the water; it is full of infusoria. The water is absolutely dangerous to use... either internally or externally." (An Enemy of the People, Act I) Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" tells the story of a conscientious man of science, Dr. Stockman, who, as the public health official for his town, feels duty bound to report scientific evidence of disease; and the burgomasters and civic leaders who see his warnings about pollution of the new public baths as a negative factor in the city's progress. The play can be read as a corollary on global warning, dependence on oil, or conspicuous consumption and Wall Street Greed. Or, as Arthur Miller interpreted it in his 1950's adaptation of Ibsen's play, a commentary on the folly of popular opinion: expressly, the public hysteria over McCarthyism. HOVSTAD: The man who would ruin a whole community must be an enemy of society! DR. STOCKMANN: It doesn't matter if a lying community is ruined!... You'll poison the whole country in time; you will bring it to such a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish. And should it come to this, I say, from the bottom of my heart: Perish the country! Perish all its people! Ibsen is a tragedian in the tradition of the Greeks, Marlowe and Shakespeare. His language may be a bit stilted for today's tastes, but his message is still relevant.

This was a pretty good book. I had to read it for my Approaches to Literature class, but actually found in easy and understandable.

I had to read A Doll House and the Wild Duck for one of my classes, and this was the edition recommended to us by the professor. I was so caught up in Ibsen that I went back and read Hedda Gabler and Master Builder in my spare time, and was not disappointed. For those who are not familar with Ibsen, his plays are studies of human interaction and psychology, and this collection slants towards the tragic (meaning that it's not quite over until someone dies). There's certain patterns readers will notice, how characters lives are inter-connected by past secrets or relations they haven't been quite honest about, and how a character's unfulfilled life is linked to past actions and someone else's meddling hand. But it's all very compelling, and once you've gotten the names straight and how everyone is related to each other, you're sucked into the drama of these lives. Of course if you don't like your modern drama depressing then this might not be for you. But any serious playwright/drama student needs to read Ibsen, and this is a fine place to start.

It is at least 50 years since I read these plays, but I have seen them performed during these years. I suggested "A Doll's House" to my book group because I believed that, though the play was written over 100 years ago, the subject matter would still be relevant. I was right. The women were so intrigued with the material, as well as the writing, that many of them went on to read the rest of the plays in the collection. The notes relating to the plays add to the interest and are enlightening.