Four Major Plays: Volume I A Doll House • The Wild Duck • Hedda Gabler • The Master Builder Among the greatest and best known of Ibsen’s works, these four plays brilliantly exemplify his landmark contributions to the theater: his realistic dialogue, probing of social problems, and depiction of characters’ inner lives as well as their actions. Rich in symbolism and often autobiographical, each of these dramas deals convincingly and provocatively with such universal themes as greed, fear, and sexual hostility, and confronts the eternal conflict between reality and illusion. These Rolf Fjelde translations have been widely acclaimed as the definitive versions of the major works of the father of modern theater. Translated and with a Foreword by Rolf Fjelde And an Afterword by Joan Templeton

"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner) The plays shine freshly from the pages ...This will be our definitive Ibsen." (JC Trewin) This volume contains Ibsen's first great modern prose play and his two last symbolic dramas. The Pillars of Society, written between 1875 and 1877, exhibits many of the classic elements which recur in the subsequent plays - a marriage founded on a lie, women stunted by social conventions, an arrogant man destroying the happiness of those around him. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), according to Edvard Munch, is "the most powerful winter landscape in Scandinavian art"; and Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), also dealing with "the coldness of heart", showed, said Bernard Shaw, "no decay of Ibsen's highest qualities. His magic is nowhere more potent.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)