Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken [Paperback]

Brian Johnston (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brian Johnston is editor of Theater Three and author of To the Third Empire (Minnesota, 1980) and Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama (Penn State, 1989).

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr (Txt); Revised edition (July 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0271008741
• ISBN-13: 978-0271008745
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,586,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Johnston, like his namesake, Johnston (or Freeman) in The Lady from the Sea, has traveled widely. After finishing sporadic elementary schooling in 1945 at age 13 and military service in Malaya (1950-53) he worked at various (unskilled) jobs, spent a year at Fircroft College, Birmingham, England and gained a scholarship to Cambridge University, in 1957. He has taught at Cambridge University, England; Norges Laererhøgskolen in Trondheim, Norway; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; the University of California-(Berkeley and Santa Barbara); Yarmouk University in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan; the University of Amman, Jordan; Beirut University College, Beirut Lebanon (1982-3; and from 1983 to 1986 at the American University of Beirut. He joined the faculty of the School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University in 1986 and is currently retired (Emeritus). He has published three critical studies of Ibsen: To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Plays (1980); The Ibsen Cycle (1975 revised 1992); Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama (1988). Performances of his translations of Ibsen include A Doll House (Center Stage, Baltimore), Ghosts (Alliance Theater, Atlanta; Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley), An Enemy of the People (Center Stage, Baltimore and Perseverance Theater, Alaska), Hedda Gabler, The Lady from the Sea (George Mason University) Rosmersholm (Washington Shakespeare Company, DC); Little Eyolf (University of Toledo, Ohio) and various other college and university productions up to the present.
He edited the journal Theater Three between 1986 and 1991 He has lectured on Ibsen in the United States and internationally. In addition to essays and reviews in numerous journals his critical work has appeared in anthologies of drama studies. Four volumes of his translations have been published by Smith and Kraus: Ibsen: 4 Major Plays translated by Rick Davis and Brian Johnston (1995); Ibsen: Volume II Four Plays (1996); Ibsen: Volume III: Four Plays (1998). His version of Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean was published in 1999 by Smith and Kraus. He edited the Norton Critical Edition of Ibsen's Selected Plays, published in 2004. It includes his new translation of Peer Gynt. In 2009 Smith and Kraus published an Electronic edition of his verse translation of Ibsen's LOVE'S COMEDY, available online as a PDF file from Smith and Kraus, Publishers, Inc.,Lyme N.H.
Brian Johnston's website is www.ibsenvoyages.com

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting framework for reading the plays, May 26, 2005

By 

Bukkene Bruse (Iowa) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken (Paperback)

Johnston builds the case that Ibsen's realist plays form a cycle based on Hegel's "Phenomenology of the Mind", stating that doing so "is not a mechanical strategy on Ibsen's part, but the starting point for the most boldly imaginative creativity, in which the artist is at no time subservient to the philosophical system." The result is an analysis that, at a minimum shows, Ibsen's body of work to be coherent as a whole and much deeper than merely a collection of liberal nineteenth-century social commentary.

The first part of the text compares the structure of dialectics in "Phenomenology" with those within the cycle as a whole, and those within the individual plays. The second part of the text deals with individual plays: linking "Ghosts" with Greek drama, discussing "Rosmersholm" as dialectic between southern European "civilization" and a northern European passion and freedom, and showing the Mithraic/Zoroastrian underpinning of "The Master Builder." This last chapter had a nice bonus for me as I had not known the extent to which Persian mythology underlay Germanic and Nordic mythology, and in particular had always wondered why there are so many parallels between Viking romances and stories in the Shahnameh.

Overall I quite enjoyed Johnston's analysis. Despite repeating "Ibsen is great" a few too many times, I found his criticism to be much more insightful, relevant, and open-minded than what I would have gotten from a more contemporary, obscure, jargon-laden analysis like those found in Marxist/Freudian/queer/feminist/postmodernist readings of texts.