130,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock 🇳🇿 

Happy Long Weekend! We're open all 3 days! 📚 Open 7 days, 8:30am–5pm

Ibsen's Selected Plays

A Norton Critical Edition
4.03 goodreads logo

Ratings/reviews counts are updated frequently.

Check link for latest rating.
( 88 ratings, 7 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Ibsen's Selected Plays presents five seminal works by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Brian Johnston and Rick Davis. It includes Peer Gynt, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, A Doll House, and Hedda Gabler, capturing the breadth of Ibsen's dramatic career. This Norton Critical Edition enriches the plays with a unique translation of Peer Gynt, alongside essays and documents that explore Ibsen's creative process and critical reception.
Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$3599
AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 3-4 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

Ideal for students, scholars, and enthusiasts of drama and literary studies, particularly those interested in modern European theatre and Ibsen's influential role within it.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

Ibsen ascended to the first ranks of European writers in the late nineteenth century and has remained there ever since.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

The Norton Critical Edition includes five major plays spanning Ibsen's long career in recent translations by Brian Johnston (Peer Gynt, The Wild Duck, and The Master Builder) and Brian Johnston and Rick Davis (A Doll House and Hedda Gabler). The translation of Peer Gynt appears for the first time in this Norton Critical Edition.

Backgrounds gives students an understanding of Ibsen's creative process with selections from his correspondence and other writings. Twenty-seven documents have been collected and arranged by play, with a section of autobiographical writings at the end.

Ibsen's plays continue to provoke diverse commentary. Criticism includes nineteen of the most important responses to Ibsen's work, among them essays by Bernard Shaw, Sandra Saari, E. M. Forster, Hugh Kenner, and Joan Templeton.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Series: Norton Critical Editions

View all
  • The Arabian Nights
    Few works of literature are as familiar and beloved as The Arabian Nights. Yet few remain also as unknown. In English, The Arabian Nights is a literary work of relatively recent date—the first versions of the tales appeared in English barely two hundred years ago. The tales are accompanied by a preface, a note on the text, and explanatory annotations....
    Paperback
    $4799
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Odyssey
    This Norton Critical Edition includes: Emily Wilson's authoritative translation of Homer's masterpiece, accompanied by her informative introduction, explanatory footnotes, and book-by-book summaries. Four maps, created especially for this translation. Contextual materials including sources and analogues by Homer, Sappho, Pindar, and others. Also included are carefully chosen passages from (mainly) ancient texts that provide insight into The Odyssey and its reception...
    By Homer
    Paperback
    $10100
    Available
    Ships in 2-3 weeks
  • Alice in Wonderland
    This Norton Critical Edition includes: The texts and original illustrations from the 1897 editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as well as the 1878 edition of The Hunting of the Snark. Revised and updated footnotes, headnotes, and introductory materials by Donald J. Gray. Selections from Carroll's diaries, letters, and other source materials examining three distinct periods...
    Paperback
    $4199
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Paradise Lost
    This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1674 text of Paradise Lost, with emendations and adoptions from the first edition and from the scribal manuscript. Spelling and punctuation have been modernised for student readers. An illuminating introduction and abundant explanatory annotations by Gordon Teskey. Source and background materials, including Milton's greatest prose work, Areopagitica, in its entirety and key selections from...
    Paperback
    $5899
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Secret Agent
    This Norton Critical Edition includes: - The first English book edition of the novel (1907), accompanied by explanatory footnotes. - Four illustrations. - Contemporary sources that informed Conrad's writing of the novel, including newspaper accounts of the "Greenwich Bomb Outrage," articles from the anarchist press, earlier fictional treatments of the Martial Bourdin case (the inspiration for Adolph Verloc), and important...
    Paperback
    $3399
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Mill on the Floss
    The text of The Mill on the Floss, based on the 1862 third edition for which Eliot made her last revisions, has been annotated to assist the reader with obscure references and allusions. Backgrounds includes fifteen letters from the 1859-69 period centring on the novel's content and composition; Brother and Sister (1869), a little-known sonnet sequence; and eight Victorian reviews...
    Paperback
    $3599
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The House of the Seven Gables
    This Norton Critical Edition includes: The first edition of the novel, published in 1851 by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. Robert S. Levine's insightful introduction, revised headnotes, expanded explanatory footnotes, and note on the text and annotations. A generous selection of carefully chosen primary materials—three of them new to the Second Edition—intended to provide readers with essential backgrounds on the novel's...
    Paperback
    $4099
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Pilgrim's Progress
    Briefly imprisoned for preaching without a license, John Bunyan is believed to have begun writing the most famous Christian allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress, while in jail. The Pilgrim's Progress was published in 1678 (Part I) and 1684 (Part II). Edited and annotated with the student reader in mind, this Norton Critical Edition is the indispensable guide to the language, allusions,...
    Paperback
    $4299
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Coquette and The Boarding School
    Hannah Webster Foster's two major Early American works with a wealth of primary materials are now available in a Norton Critical Edition. Published anonymously in 1797, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette grabbed American interest with its ripped-from-the-headlines story of sex and scandal. A steady bestseller for decades, the seduction novel was passed down through generations; indeed, its heroine became better...
    Paperback
    $3699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Conjure Stories
    Fourteen conjure tales by one of America's most influential African American fiction writers. This Norton Critical Edition of The Conjure Stories arranges the tales chronologically by composition date, allowing readers to discern how Chesnutt experimented with plots and characters and with the idea of the conjure story over time. With one exception, the text of each tale is that of...
    Paperback
    $3299
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Blithedale Romance
    This Norton Critical Edition of The Blithedale Romance is based on the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, widely considered the best available edition. It is accompanied by explanatory annotations to help readers with Hawthorne's many historical and literary references, as well as with other possible sources of difficulty in the text. The section on "Contexts" is thematically...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
    Known only as the "Ex-Colored Man," the protagonist in Johnson's novel is forced to choose between celebrating his African American heritage or "passing" as an average white man in a post-Reconstruction America that is rapidly changing. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1912 text. It is accompanied by a detailed introduction, explanatory footnotes, and a note on the...
    Paperback
    $3799
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780393924046

Publisher: WW Norton & Co

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 10 June 2003

Country: United States

Imprint: WW Norton & Co

Edition: Critical edition

Contributors:

  • Edited by Brian Johnston

Audience: Tertiary education

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 38.0mm

Width: 130.0mm

Height: 216.0mm

Weight: 516g

Pages: 640

About the Author

Brian Johnston is Professor of Dramatic Literature at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of To the Third Empire: Ibsen’s Early Drama, Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama and The Ibsen Cycle. He is translator, with Rick Davis, of Ibsen: Volume I: Four Major Plays and translator of Ibsen: Volume II: Four Major Plays.

Also by Henrik Ibsen

View all
  • A Doll's House and Other Plays
    The plays in this volume, each written a decade apart, demonstrate different sides of Henrik Ibsen's genius, but all deal with themes of alienation from society and the breaking down of convention. A Doll's House portrays a woman questioning her duty to her husband and seeking to escape from the stifling confines of her marriage—a theme that shocked contemporary audiences...
    Paperback
    $1799
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Hedda Gabler and Other Plays
    The final volume in the new Penguin Ibsen series: superb modern translations of four of Ibsen's greatest plays. In these four unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the complex nature of truth, the tension between freedom and responsibility, and the terrible pull that the past exerts over the present. In The Wild Duck, an idealist destroys a family by exposing...
    Paperback
    $2900
    Elsewhere:
    $3200
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Hedda Gabler and Other Plays: Popular Penguins
    In these three unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the problems of personal and social morality that he perceived in the world around him and, in particular, the complex nature of truth. Hedda Gabler and Other Plays: Popular Penguins offers readers an insight into the intricate dynamics of human relationships and the moral dilemmas of society. Ibsen's compelling storytelling and...
    Paperback
    $1599
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • A Doll's House and Other Plays
    This new translation, the first to be based on the latest critical edition of Ibsen's works, offers the best version available in English. Four of Ibsen's most important plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series. With her assertion that she is 'first and foremost a human being', Nora Helmer sent shockwaves throughout Europe when she...
    Paperback
    $2700
    Elsewhere:
    $3000
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Doll’s House
    This revised Student Edition of Ibsen’s popular play contains introductory commentary and notes by Sophie Duncan, which offer a contemporary lens on the play's gender politics and consider seminal productions and adaptations of the play into the 21st century. As well as the complete text of the play itself, this new Methuen Drama Student Edition includes a: Chronology of the...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Ghosts, A Public Enemy, When We Dead Wake
    These three plays focus on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling and exposing lies. In Ghosts, Osvald Alving returns home only to discover the truth about the father he respected and the horrific effect his father's debauchery has had on him. Ibsen's most provocative drama, it strips away the surface of a middle-class family to...
    Paperback
    $2199
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Peer Gynt and Brand
    Masterful versions of Ibsen's two great verse plays by one of our greatest living poets, Geoffrey Hill. These two masterly and contrasting verse dramas by Ibsen made his reputation as a playwright. The fantastical adventures of the irrepressible Peer Gynt—poet, idler, procrastinator, seducer—draw on Norwegian folklore to conjure up mountains, kidnappings, shipwrecks, and trolls in an exuberant celebration of life;...
    Paperback
    $3299
    Elsewhere:
    $3600
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • A Doll's House
    Ibsen's seminal play, which changed modern drama, is a searing view of a male-dominated and authoritarian society, presented with a realism that elevates theatre to a level above mere entertainment. The reverberations of Nora’s slamming the door as she leaves Torvald continue to the present day. Plays for Performance Series.
    Paperback
    $2711
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Hedda Gabler
    Too frightened of scandal to become involved with a brilliant writer, Hedda Gabler opts instead for a conventional but loveless marriage. But, when her first love returns with a masterpiece that might threaten her husband's career, Hedda decides to take drastic and fatal action. Universally condemned in 1890 when it was written, Hedda Gabler has subsequently become one of Ibsen's...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Ibsen Plays: 4
    Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field (George Steiner). The plays shine freshly from the pages ... This will be our definitive Ibsen. (JC Trewin) Ibsen Plays: 4 contains Ibsen's first great...
    Paperback
    $3699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Doll's House
    I think I'm a human being before anything else. I don't care what other people say. I don't care what people write in books. I need to think for myself. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premiered in 1879 in Copenhagen, the second in a series of realist plays by Ibsen, and immediately provoked controversy with its apparently feminist message and...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Doll's House
    If I get run over tomorrow, how are you paying the Amex off? If you get run over tomorrow, why should I care because I am flinging myself into the road after you. Nora and Torvald’s marriage vows are a binding contract, but when scandal threatens to wreck their lives, it’s time to renegotiate the terms. Money, sex, power –...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

More from Arts & Culture

View all
  • Dylan's Pick
    Bold Types
    A tribute to 32 truly independent bookshops throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, from north of Auckland down to Dunedin, and coast to coast. Jane Ussher's photographs show every bookstore in its unique nature - including behind the counter, smoko rooms, the mess which tells the hardworking story behind the joy of matching books with customers. Jemma Moreira's careful editing has crafted...
    Hardback
    $5999
    Elsewhere:
    $7000
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • New Release
    I’ll Believe in Anything
    From Jacob Tierney, the creator of Heated Rivalry, in partnership with Brendan Brady and Accent Aigu, comes I’ll Believe in Anything, an official and complete collection of annotated scripts for the biggest cultural sensation of the year, with all new exclusive behind-the-scenes content.Based on Rachel Reid’s blockbuster Game Changers book series, Heated Rivalry premiered on Crave and HBO in late 2025 and immediately took the world by storm. I’ll...
    Hardback
    $5499
    Elsewhere:
    $6000
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • On Sale
    16% off
    New Release
    Home Again
    Join rock-legend, former Shihad frontman and lead singer of The Adults, Jon Toogood in this unflinching and no-holds-barred memoir Home Again.This is more than a rock story. Toogood looks back on a 37-year career that helped define New Zealand rock music, and the personal cost that came with it. From a music-obsessed childhood in Wellington to the deafening roar of international stages, this...
    Paperback
    $2700
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • On Sale
    20% off
    The Odyssey
    Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travellers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative....
    By Homer
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $3599
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • On Sale
    21% off
    The Iliad
    When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017—revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)—critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an...
    By Homer
    Paperback
    $2600
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • New Release
    A Life in Lyrics
    Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest showmen of the twentieth century. With his unparalleled voice and searing on-stage energy, he was a great pretender, a killer queen and a champion of the world. But behind the glamour lived a musician and lyricist talented beyond measure, and the creative force behind one of the most culturally significant and musically diverse...
    Hardback
    $5000
    Elsewhere:
    $6500
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Disney Moana: The Official Cookbook
    On Sale
    20% off
    Disney Moana: The Official Cookbook
    Embark on a culinary adventure with Moana of Motunui with Pacific recipes inspired by Moana and Moana 2! After a long day of sailing to see how far you’ll go or keeping the demigod Maui out of trouble with Te Fiti, catch a break with the delicious dishes in Moana: The Official Cookbook! Featuring more than 50 recipes spanning the...
    Hardback
    $3600
    Elsewhere:
    $5299
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Birdlands Birdlands
    New Release
    Birdlands
    A rare, intimate journey into the wild islands where Aotearoa's birds live beyond the reach of most human lives. In the most remote outposts of Aotearoa, our islands are populated not with people, but with birds. From the storm-lashed Subantarctic Islands in the deep south to the scattered volcanic islands of Tikapa Moana/Hauraki Gulf in the north, Birdlands offers a...
    Hardback
    $4199
    Elsewhere:
    $5000
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • On Sale
    21% off
    This Angry Pen of Mine
    This Angry Pen of Mine by Layne Staley invites you to dive into the untold creative world of Layne Staley, the legendary voice behind Alice in Chains. This extraordinary collection showcases his handwritten lyrics, deeply personal poetry, stunning original artwork, rare photos, fan tributes, and so much more. Step into the world of Layne Staley like never before. For the...
    Hardback
    $5800
    Elsewhere:
    $8999
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Beautiful Chaos
    New Release
    Beautiful Chaos
    Featuring five exclusive new poems, this stunning foil-embossed hardback edition is a collector's item and a gorgeous gift. The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller. Selected poems on motherhood from bestselling author and Instagram poet, Jessica Urlichs. 'Reading Jess's poems makes me feel like she's somehow reached into my own personal reflections and articulated them in a way I never could.' –...
    Hardback
    $3299
    Elsewhere:
    $4000
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Split Enz
    New Release
    Split Enz
    'My favourite band. Ever! And certainly the best dressed.' Sam Neill Split Enz were never designed to fit. Emerging from art school mischief in early-1970s New Zealand, they turned pop into surreal theatre: costume, character and melody colliding in a rock band that refused to behave like one. At the centre of that vision was Noel Crombie—percussionist, performer and the...
    Hardback
    $5199
    Elsewhere:
    $6500
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday
  • Mah Jong Player's Companion
    Since the arrival on the market of Patricia Thompson and Betty Maloney's two previous books, The Game of Mah Jong Illustrated and Improve Your Mah Jong, a wide range of hands from many parts of the world has been sent to them. In this player's companion, the authors have put together a cross-filled reference guide where over 120 hands, illustrated...
    Paperback
    $1999
    Elsewhere:
    $2299
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships Tuesday

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 100,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.