Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price

Restless and discontented in her marriage, Hedda Gabler is drawn to a former admirer, Lovborg, now a brilliant writer. But he is more taken with Hedda's old schoolfriend. Driven by jealousy, Hedda destroys Lovborg and his precious manuscript and, finally, herself.

This English version of Henrik Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler, published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish.

About the Author
Born in Norway in 1828, Ibsen began his writing career with romantic history plays influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller. In 1851 he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly established Norwegian Theatre in Bergen with a contract to write a play a year for five years, following which he was made Artistic Director of the Norwegian Theatre in what is now Oslo. In the 1860s he moved abroad to concentrate wholly on writing. He began with two mighty verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, and in the 1870s and 1880s wrote the sequence of realistic 'problem' plays for which he is best known, among them A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm. His last four plays, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, dating from his return to Norway in the 1890s, are increasingly overlaid with symbolism. Illness forced him to retire in 1900, and he died in 1906 after a series of crippling strokes. Kenneth McLeish was the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain and, until his early death in 1997, edited the NHB Drama Classics series.


Book Information
ISBN 9781854591845
Author Henrik Ibsen
Format Paperback
Page Count 130
Imprint Nick Hern Books
Publisher Nick Hern Books
Weight(grams) 95g
Dimensions(mm) 160mm * 105mm * 10mm