A Doll's House
Translated by R. Farquharson Sharp
A Doll's House is a three-act play written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. The play is set in a Norwegian town Circa 1879.
The play concerns the fate of a married woman, who at the time in Norway lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world, despite the fact that Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play. It was a great sensation at the time, and caused a "storm of outraged controversy" that went beyond the theatre to the world of newspapers and society.
Ibsen was inspired by the belief that "a woman cannot be herself in modern society," since it is "an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint." Its ideas can also be seen as having a wider application: Michael Meyer argued that the play's theme is not women's rights, but rather "the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person." In a speech given to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in 1898, Ibsen insisted that he "must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement," since he wrote "without any conscious thought of making propaganda," his task having been "the description of humanity." However, the play is associated with feminism, as Miriam Schneir includes it in her anthology Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, labelling it as one of the essential feminist works.
In 2006, the centennial of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the world's most performed play that year. UNESCO has inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value.
Excerpted from A Doll's House on Wikipedia.
A Doll's House
| Author | Henrik Ibsen |
| Country | Norway |
| Genre | Drama, Problem play, Tragedy |
| Copyright | Public domain worldwide. |
| Book cover | Thanks to Canva |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg. |
| Scans | Google-digitized. |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Group, Dramatic Readings 01 02 03 |
| Read online | A Doll’s House |