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Ibsen 's Selected Plays. Selected and Edited by Brian Johnston. New York and London: Norton, 2004. A Norton Critical Edition. i-xxi+ 1-612. US$18.25
Brian Johnston has put together an anthology at once helpfully informative, incisive, and spacious. It would be my Ibsen anthology of choice in courses outside of Scandinavian departments (which, I hope and assume, teach Ibsen in Norwegian.)
Johnston's comprehensive, general "Introduction" concisely defines the state of the European theater about 1850 as "technically adroit" and "intellectually vapid." That is shorthand but permissible, given the occasion, and not inaccurate. Johnston contrasts older tragedy, which was about the integrity of the protagonist, with Ibsen's, which is about the protagonist's authenticity-an important and beautiful distinction. He also calls attention to the dramatic potential in the contradictions between nineteenth-century bourgeois idealism turned sterile convention, and pragmatism, which entails abusive capitalism and colonialism. In thoughtful and sensitive contemporary minds the disparity bred inner conflicts about identity, responsibility, and self-realization, and about the function of drama in a changing society. Ibsen's corrosive realism put dialectics in the place of melodrama and Victorians in the place of postShakespearean puppets spouting blank verse. Johnston notes the irony in Ibsen's repudiation of "the theatrical medium he was intellectually to dominate." There is more to Ibsen's plays than Johnston's Shavian formula-that their plots "are the dialectic in action," its purpose "the undoing of false reality"~but the formula is not without support in the plays.
On Ibsen's dramaturgy, Johnston shows that his stage design and props (sets, including doors, windows, furniture), dress, and lighting invest the dialogue with meanings...