Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt ( peer GHINT, Norwegian: [peːr ˈjʏnt, - ˈɡʏnt]) is a five-act play in verse written in 1867 by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. It is one of Ibsen's best known and most widely performed plays. Peer Gynt chronicles the journey of its titular character from the Norwegian mountains to the North African desert and back. According to Klaus Van Den Berg, "its origins are Romantic, but the play also anticipates the fragmentations of emerging modernism" and the "cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones." Peer Gynt has also been described as the story of a life based on procrastination and avoidance. Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its forty scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism. Raymond Williams compares Peer Gynt with August Strindberg's early drama Lucky Peter's Journey (1882) and argues that both explore a new kind of dramatic action that was beyond the capacities of the theatre of the day; both created "a sequence of images in language and visual composition" that "became technically possible only in film." Ibsen believed Per Gynt, a Norwegian fairy-tale by which the play is loosely inspired, to be rooted in fact. He also wrote that he had used his own family—the intertwined Ibsen/Paus family of Skien—and childhood memories as "some kind of model" for the Gynt family; he acknowledged that the character of Åse—Peer Gynt's mother—was based on his own mother, Marichen Altenburg, while Peer's father Jon Gynt is widely interpreted as based on Ibsen's father Knud Ibsen. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian fairy-tales, Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn, published in 1845....