Hedda Gabler Methuen Student Edtion - Student Editions Author:Henrik Ibsen Universally condemned in 1890 when it was written, Hedda Gabler has since become one of Ibsen's most frequently performed plays. Its title role is elusive and complex: Hedda is an intelligent and ambitious woman, who has no means of finding personal fulfillment in the stifling world of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Too fright... more »ened of scandal to become involved with a brilliant, wayward writer, she opts for a conventional but loveless marriage in the hope of finding surrogate satisfaction through her husband's career. Blending comedy and tragedy disconcertingly together, Ibsen probes the thwarted aspirations and hidden anxieties of his characters against a background of contemporary social conditions and attitudes. "Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama."-George Steiner« less