牛津英文经典：易卜生戏剧集

牛津英文经典（Oxford World’s Classics）为牛津大学出版社百年积淀的精品书系，译林出版社原版引进。除牛津品牌保证的quanwei原著版本之外，每册书附含名家导读、作家简介及年表、词汇解析、文本注释、背景知识拓展、同步阅读导引、版本信息等，特别适合作为大学生和学有余力的中学生英语学习的必读材料。导读者包括牛津和剑桥大学的资深教授和知名学者。整套书选目精良，便携易读，实为亲近*名著的经典读本。

易卜生是19世纪挪威著名戏剧大师、诗人，是现实主义文学代表人物之一、欧洲近代戏剧的奠基人。本书收录了易卜生负有盛名的四部戏剧：《玩偶之家》《群鬼》《海达·加布勒》《建筑大师》。它们立足生活实际，从多方面剖析社会问题，揭露和批判的锋芒直指资产阶级社会的种种弊端，触及到法律、宗教、道德乃至国家、政党、体制等各个领域，是阅读、理解易卜生戏剧的重要资料。

本书收录易卜生负有盛名的四部戏剧：《玩偶之家》《群鬼》《海达·加布勒》《建筑大师》。《玩偶之家》1879年在斯堪的纳维亚首演时即引起了轰动。在该剧以及随后的《群鬼》中，易卜生揭露了一个自以为义的伪善社会中一些未经检验的观点；作者清晰地描绘了女主人公们对社会的观察，以及她们所处的地位，即使在今天作者认识之深刻依然令人惊讶。《海达·加布勒》与《建筑大师》将焦点从社会给女性施加的压力，转向人企图控制他人时，对他人施加的压力。正如一位当代评论家所说，海达·加布勒是“一个不择手段的野心家”；她是一个有缺陷的理想主义者，在个人困境中痛苦挣扎。

亨利克·易卜生，19世纪挪威戏剧大师，欧洲近代戏剧的奠基人，对现代戏剧的发展影响深远。其戏剧创作以严峻的真实、深邃的思想和精湛的艺术，在现代戏剧史上占有十分重要的地位，代表作有诗剧《彼尔·金特》，社会悲剧《玩偶之家》《群鬼》《人民公敌》《海达·加布勒》等，象征性剧作《野鸭》《当我们死而复醒时》等。

Introduction
Select Bibliography
Chronology of Henrik Ibsen
A Doll’s House
Ghosts
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder

Introduction
In an age when literature addressed itself to the debating of problems, Henrik Ibsen waited for question time and cast his dramas in an interrogative mould. ‘I do but ask,’ he at one point insisted, ‘my call is not to answer.’ In its totality his creative career fits almost exactly into the second half of the nineteenth century: his first prentice drama was published in the early spring of 1850, and his final ‘dramatic epilogue’ appeared in the last December days of 1899. It is however from the second half of this career, and from the last quarter of the century, that the four plays in this volume are drawn. They form part of that incomparable series of twelve investigative ‘dramas of contemporary life’ which filled these years—a period of sustained creative endeavor unparalleled in the history of the modern theatre and one which gave a whole new impetus and direction to the drama of the twentieth century.

The series began in 1877 with the publication of Pillars of Society; and it was largely through its immediate (and multiple) translation into German and its rapid and sensational success in the German theatre that Ibsen began to reach out to a wider European public. But it was the next two plays in the series—A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881)—which on their appearance and during the following years and decades were to bring the name of Ibsen inescapably to the attention of the world. The two plays belong inherently together. Indeed, not only did Ibsen himself define A Doll’s House as ‘an introduction and preparation for Ghosts’ but he also and more explicitly asserted that ‘Ghosts had to be written…. After Nora, Mrs. Alving had of necessity to come.’ Together these two plays provokes a storm of outraged controversy that penetrated far beyond the confines of the theatre proper into the leader columns of the Western press and the drawing rooms of polite society.

In much the same way that A Doll’s House and Ghosts thus complement each other, so the other two plays in this volume?—Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892)—share a common dramatic purpose. As numbers eight and nine in the duodecimal series, they are similarly contiguous. Nevertheless in the intervening years between the two pairs—years in which there appeared An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886) and The Lady from the Sea (1888)—a distinct shift in the author’s preoccupations is evident: from the social to the visionary, from the naturalistic to the symbolic, from the problematical to the psychological, from the demonstrative to the evocative. At the same time, this shift remains firmly located within one unifying progression; and it is useful to see the two pairs of plays as relating to each other in a way not dissimilar from the way the individual plays within the pair do. It is not without relevance in this respect that when in later life Ibsen wrote a brief preface to the collected edition of his works, he commended the whole corpus of his authorship as ‘a continuing and cohesive whole’.
Most of the work on A Doll’s House was done while Ibsen was resident in Rome in 1879, though the final revisions to it were made while holidaying in Amalfi later that summer. A few notes and jottings from the previous autumn indicate that from the very first Ibsen was intent on writing a drama which would highlight the anomalous position of women in the prevailingly male-dominated society. ‘A woman [he wrote] cannot be herself in contemporary society; it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view.’ In these notes he claimed to be able to identify two kinds of conscience, one in man and a completely different one in woman; and he pointed to the inevitable confusion over matters of right and wrong that inescapably follows when a woman is judged by man’s law, and when in consequence her natural instincts are brought into conflict with the notions of authority she has grown up with.

易卜生戏剧敢于面对真实的人生，他的戏剧具有很大的启蒙社会的思想意义。易卜生主义代表我的人生观，代表我的宗教。
—— 胡适
易卜生这个名儿，萦绕于青年的胸中，传述于青年的口头，不亚于今日之下的马克思和列宁。
——茅盾
外国剧作家对我的影响较多的，头一个是易卜生。我为他的剧作谨严的结构，朴素而精练的语言，以及他对资本主义社会现实所发出的锐利的疑问所吸引。
——曹禺 《玩偶之家》影响了中国当时的妇女解放运动。——梁文道