Peer Gynt

This edition carries illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Written by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen and published in 1867, Peer Gynt is generally regarded as his best-known play. Its central figure takes his name from Per Gynt, a character of Scandinavian folk tale, though Ibsen reshaped him freely. The five-act work opens at a wedding where Peer abducts the bride, and the episodes that follow are equally reckless. He drinks with three flirtatious dairymaids who are being courted by trolls, meets the Troll King inside the mountains, and travels to North Africa, where he trades in slaves and sends idols to China. Among the Bedouin he is taken in as a prophet, and in Egypt he holds conversations with the Sphinx. Back in Norway, he must face a reckoning of his conduct and his many failings. The final scene brings in the Button-moulder, who insists that Peer's soul will be melted down with other defective goods unless Peer can prove when, if ever, he was truly himself.

Ibsen's play has been staged, argued over, and examined at major universities around the world. Its themes concern the human struggle to improve oneself and the ways people can fall short of that goal. Peer draws women to him, yet he is vain, self-absorbed, dishonest, and quick to deceive himself. The question of whether he can justify his life and become a better man is left as the play's open problem for the reader to weigh. Ibsen also asked the composer Edvard Grieg to write incidental music for the production, and the best-known result, the suite titled In the Hall of the Mountain King, is still widely performed on its own.