The Master Builder and Other Plays [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The first volume* of Ibsen's plays in this series contained three plays, Pillars of the Comtnunity, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler, all representative of that phase of Ibsen's thought and art in which he was concerned primarily with the relation of the individual to the community, with his social and personal morality, with the effects of his conduct upon the world about him, with the judgement delivered upon that conduct at the bar of public opinion and to a greater or less degree also by his own conscience. The group of plays chosen for the second volume come from the later and fmal phase of Ibsen's work in which, though his characteristic belief in the validity of truth, in every operation of Ufe and in every process of thought, is as clear as ever, his concern is rather with the inner experience of the individual, with his often unaided exploration of that experience, with the reassessment and revaluation of his past at some ultimate turning-point of his soul's pilgrimage. If these last plays are still, as in some sense they all are, studies of conversion, of the crisis in which a man is brought face to face with himself, the overruling agencies are no longer now the criticism of the world but the visions released from the depth of the soul in hours of lonely reflection; the characteristic predicaments are not those of Karsten Bemick faced with Lona Hessel's demand for repentance and confession nor of Hjalmar Ekdal before Gregers Werle's 'claims of the ideal', but, instead, of Rebekka West's self-discovery, prompted as often by the implications as by the intentions of the other characters' words, or of John Gabriel Borkman's heroic delusion, maintained in the face of fact, yet already ripe for collapse at the touch of a truth he has long secretly acknowledged. Rosinersholm, fmished in 1886, is the first of the final group, following immediately after The Wild Duck, the last of the earlier. Six years later, the interval being filled by The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler, comes The Master Builder in 1892, the second play in this volume. This was followed, after the normal interval of two years, by Little Eyolf {1894), our third play and by John Gabriel Borkman *I would refer readers to the first few pages of that volume for a few general, introductory comments on Ibsen's thought as it is reflected in the prose plays.