The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Ibsen, Henrik
Ibsen, Henrik
(
1828
–
1906
), Norwegian dramatist, generally acknowledged as the founder of modern prose drama. His first successes, Brand (
1866
) and Peer Gynt (
1867
), both ‘dramatic poems’, created his name in Scandinavia, but it was over 20 years before the work of
Gosse
and
Archer
(and later the support of
Hardy
,
W.
James
,
G.
B.
Shaw
, and others) established him as a major dramatist in England. In
1872
Gosse wrote a review of Poems of the unknown
Ibsen
, and in
1872
translated an early play (Love's Comedy) and published an enthusiastic account of Ibsen's work. In the same year Archer read
Ibsen's
Emperor and Galilean, and his translation of The Pillars of Society was used for the first performance of Ibsen in England in
1880
(a single matinée) which was largely ignored. Archer introduced and read Ibsen to the young Shaw, who became...
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