This book is a fully revised and largely expanded successor to Mr Williams's widely read Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952). In it he argues that although plays are meant to be acted, any play in which the text is no more than an outline, to be filled in by acting, production and decor, must fall short of the purpose and full scope of drama. The naturalistic theatre is criticised because in spite of some great achievements, the devices it makes use of to express the depths of human experience are never really adequate substitutes for the traditional language of the theatre: poetry.
Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama explores the intertextual conversations and palimpsestuous relations between modern and contemporary European dramatists such as Alan Bennett, Elfriede Jelinek, Milan Kundera, Heiner Muller, and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, and canonical texts by novelists and dramatists including Choderlos de Laclos, Denis Diderot, Henrik Ibsen, and Franz Kafka. Witkiewicz and Jelinek represent avant-garde subversions and transgressions of Ibsen's theatrical naturalism.
A Doll’s House, written two years after The Pillars of Society, was the first of Ibsen’s plays to create a sensation and is now perhaps his most famous play, and required reading in many secondary schools and universities. The play was highly controversial when first published, as it is sharply critical of 19th Century marriage norms. It follows the formula of well-made play up until the final act, when it breaks convention by ending with a discussion, not an unravelling. It is often called the first true feminist play, although Ibsen denied this.
"Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright of realistic drama and poet. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and is one of the founders of modernism in the theatre. Alongside Knut Hamsun, Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians, and one of the most important playwrights of all time. His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous.
The Feast at Solhaug (or in the original Norwegian Gildet paa Solhoug) is the first publicly successful drama by Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1855 and had its premier at Det norske Theater in Bergen on January 2, 1856. Part of the strength and charm of this play as well as Ibsen's other early poetic works results from the style of the poetic form and the inherent melody of the old ballads for those who speak Scandinavian languages.
