Ghosts Henrik Ibsen

The plays in this volume focus on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling lies - and exposing them. In "Ghosts", Osvald Alving returns home only to discover the truth about the father he always looked up to, and learns the horrific effect his father's debauchery has had on him. It was Ibsen's most provocative drama, stripping away the surface of a middle-class family to expose layers of hypocrisy and immorality. "A Public Enemy" sets two brothers against each other when one wishes to make public the facts about the polluted water in the public baths of their home town. And "When We Dead Wake" tells of an artist meeting an old lover by chance and rejecting his wife, in a symbolic exploration of Ibsen's own literary life and the sacrifices he made in his work. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Reproduction of the original: Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen Translated by Christopher Hampton Full Length, Drama Characters: 3 male, 2 female Interior Set This riveting family drama is a classic of the modern theatre. Oswald Alving returns for the dedication of the orphanage to his father's memory and has a flirtation with the family maid who, it turns out, is his father's illegitimate daughter. As the long-supressed truths collide, the orphanage is destroyed by fire, the maid deserts the family in disgust when she learns her true parentage, and Mrs. Alving is left alone to care for her hopelessly insane son who has fallen prey to the social disease that killed his father. The role of Mrs. Alving, considered one of the greatest in the modern repertoire, has been played by Liv Ullman, Geraldine Page, Eva Le Galliene, Mrs. Fiske, Alla Nazimova and Eleonora Duse.

The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), 'the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury'; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father ('Where,' asked George Bernard Shaw, 'shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?'); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman. Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Ghosts" (A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts) by Henrik Ibsen. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.