Peer Gynt

Ibsen wrote "Peer Gynt" while in Italy in 1867. He warned his publisher that it would be "a large-scale dramatic poem, the main character of which is to be one of those half-mythological fairy-tale figures in the public domain from the recent past". It was his last work to use poetry as a medium of dramatic expression, but it carries the marks of his later prose plays in the kind of spare, dramatically eloquent dialogue which has become characteristic of 20th century drama. "Peer Gynt" draws on Ibsen's own childhood and character - he wrote that he derived many features of Peer Gynt "from self-dissection". The present translation is taken from the Oxford Ibsen series and should be of interest to students of 19th and 20th century drama and Scandinavian studies as well as the general reader.