Early Plays — Catiline, the Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans

Ibsen is the orderly development of his genius. He himself repeatedly maintained that his dramas were not mere isolated accidents. In the foreword to the readers in the popular edition of 1898 he urges the public to read his dramas in the same order ... Read more

Ibsen is the orderly development of his genius. He himself repeatedly maintained that his dramas were not mere isolated accidents. In the foreword to the readers in the popular edition of 1898 he urges the public to read his dramas in the same order in which he had written them, deplores the fact that his earlier works are less known and less understood than his later works, and insists that his writings taken as a whole constitute an organic unity. The three of his plays offered here for the first time in English translation will afford those not familiar with theoriginal Norwegian some light on the early stages of his development. Catiline, the earliest of Ibsen splays, was written in 1849, while Ibsen was an apothecarys apprentice in Grimstad. It appeared in Christiania in the following spring under th pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme. The revolutionary atmosphere of 1848-49, the reading of the story of Catiline in Sallust and Cicero in preparation for the university examinations, the hostility which existed between the apprentice and his immediate social environment, the fate which the play met at the hands of the theatrical management and the publishers, his own struggles at the time, are all set forth clearly enough in the preface to the second edition. The play was written in the blank verse of Oehlenschlae-7 gers romantic dramas. Less