Peer Gynt
by Henrik Ibsen
- Used
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
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Torrance, California, United States
999 Copies Available from This Seller
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About This Item
IBSEN'S "PEER GYNT"
Oct. 7, 1892. A Masterpiece.
"Peer Gynt takes its place, as we hold, on the summits of
literature precisely because it means so much more than the poet
consciously intended. Is not this one of the characteristics of
the masterpiece, that everyone can read in it his own secret? In
the material world (though Nature is very innocent of symbolic
intention) each of us finds for himself the symbols that have
relevance and value for him; and so it is with the poems that are
instinct with true vitality."
I was glad to come across the above passage in Messrs. William and
Charles Archer's introduction to their new translation of Ibsen's
Peer Gynt (London: Walter Scott), because I can now, with a clear
conscience, thank the writers for their book, even though I fail to
find some of the things they find in it. The play's the thing after
all. Peer Gynt is a great poem: let us shake hands over that. It
will remain a great poem when we have ceased pulling it about to find
what is inside or search out texts for homilies in defence of our own
particular views of life. The world's literature stands unaffected,
though Archdeacon Farrar use it for chapter-headings and Sir John
Lubbock wield it as a mallet to drive home self-evident truths.
Synopsis
Henrik Ibsen was born of well-to-do parents at Skien, a small Norwegian coastal town, on March 20, 1828. In 1836 his father went bankrupt, and the family was reduced to near poverty. At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad. In 1850 Ibsen ventured to Christiania present-day Oslo as a student, with the hope of becoming a doctor. On the strength of his first two plays he was appointed “theater-poet” to the new Bergen National Theater, where he wrote five conventional romantic and historical dramas and absorbed the elements of his craft. In 1857 he was called to the directorship of the financially unsound Christiania Norwegian Theater, which failed in 1862. In 1864, exhausted and enraged by the frustration of his efforts toward a national drama and theater, he quit Norway for what became twenty-seven years of voluntary exile abroad. In Italy he wrote the volcanic Brand (1866), which made his reputation and secured him a poet’s stipend from the government. Its companion piece, the phantasmagoric Peer Gynt , followed in 1867, then the immense double play, Emperor and Galilean (1873), expressing his philosophy of civilization. Meanwhile, having moved to Germany, Ibsen had been searching for a new style. With The Pillars of Society he found it; this became the first of twelve plays, appearing at two-year intervals, that confirmed his international standing as the foremost dramatist of his age. In 1900 Ibsen suffered the first of several strokes that incapacitated him. He died in Oslo on May 23, 1906.
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Details
- Bookseller
- IDB Productions (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 9781776766758
- Title
- Peer Gynt
- Author
- Henrik Ibsen
- Format/Binding
- MP3 Audio CD
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 999
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IDB Productions
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