Reading Order
Ghosts Reading Order
Ghosts (1881, premiered 1882) by Henrik Ibsen is the most scandalous play of the nineteenth century — Mrs. Alving's recognition, in a single catastrophic day, of everything she has repressed for twenty-six years: her husband's dissolute life, his illegitimate daughter Regine, her son Oswald's syphilis inherited from his father, and the question of whether she can honor Oswald's request to end his life when the disease reaches its final stage. The play was denounced in the strongest possible terms when it was published: a London critic called it 'an open sewer'; the Lord Chamberlain banned it from the English stage for twenty years; reviewers across Europe described it as obscene, immoral, and degrading. What Ibsen had done was bring onto the stage, in explicit dramatic form, the consequences of the sexual hypocrisy and domestic repression that his contemporaries preferred not to examine — and the fury of the reaction showed exactly how accurately he had identified the wound.
Where to start
Ghosts (1882) — the complete play in one of the standard translations: Michael Meyer (Methuen), Frank McGuinness (Faber), or Don Shewey (available online). Best reading order: A Doll's House (1879) → Ghosts (1882) → An Enemy of the People (1882) → The Wild Duck (1884). Ghosts is the direct sequel to A Doll's House in Ibsen's thematic development, showing the wife who stayed
Complete Ghosts Book List
- 1Buy
Ghosts
Henrik Ibsen·1882·The most scandalous play of its century — Mrs. Alving's day of recognition about Captain Alving's life, Oswald's syphilis, Regine's identity, and the mercy killing question. The play that established Ibsen as the most dangerous and the most important playwright in Europe - 2Buy
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen·1879·The essential predecessor — the wife who left. Ibsen wrote Ghosts as a response to the controversy around A Doll's House: where critics had asked whether Nora was right to leave, Ibsen now showed what happened to the wife who had stayed. Mrs. Alving stayed for twenty-six years, doing her duty, and Ghosts shows the cost of that duty. The two plays must be read together - 3Buy
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen·1891·The later psychological companion — where Ghosts is about repression and its consequences, Hedda Gabler is about will and its perversions. Both plays are organized around a woman whose exceptional intelligence cannot find adequate expression in the world assigned to her, and both show the destructive consequences of that constraint — but Mrs. Alving is destroyed by what she has submitted to, while Hedda is destroyed by what she refuses to submit to - 4Buy
Long Day's Journey into Night
Eugene O'Neill·1956·The American companion in the tradition of the family play about the past's presence in the present — the Tyrones' terrible day of accusation and recognition. Both Ghosts and Long Day's Journey into Night are organized around a family's attempt to confront its secrets in a single concentrated time (one day in each case), and both use the same formal structure: the gradual revelation of what has been concealed, moving toward an ending that offers no resolution or hope - 5Buy
All My Sons
Arthur Miller·1947·Miller's 1947 companion in the American tradition of the social problem play about the secrets that families keep — Joe Keller's wartime sale of defective airplane parts and the consequences. All My Sons is the most directly Ibsenite of Miller's plays: the gradual revelation of a crime, the consequences for the family, the question of what responsibility requires. Miller acknowledged Ibsen as his primary influence in drama - 6Buy
Miss Julie
August Strindberg·1888·The Swedish contemporary companion — the one-act play about class, desire, and the seduction of the aristocratic Julie by the valet Jean. Miss Julie and Ghosts are companion scandals of the same decade: both were denounced as immoral and obscene, both dealt with sexual subject matter that the Victorian stage had excluded, and both used naturalistic technique to show consequences that conventional morality preferred to ignore - 7Buy
The Father
August Strindberg·1887·Strindberg's 1887 companion and the other great Scandinavian play about marriage, gender, and power — the Captain's destruction by his wife's manipulation of his uncertainty about his daughter's paternity. The Father and Ghosts are the two most harrowing Scandinavian plays of their decade, and Strindberg wrote The Father partly in response to the feminist arguments that Ibsen's plays had raised - 8Buy
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller·1949·Miller's masterwork and the fullest American development of the Ibsenian tradition of the social problem play about the past in the present — Willy Loman's terrible final day. Death of a Salesman takes the formal technique of Ghosts (the past pressing into the present through memory, guilt, and the return of what was repressed) and gives it the expressionistic form that the American theater had developed from German Expressionism: Willy's memories interrupt the present directly, making the past visible on stage
Ghosts — Frequently Asked Questions
What are the "ghosts" in Ghosts by Ibsen?
The 'ghosts' of the title are the dead ideas, dead conventions, and dead relationships that continue to haunt and determine the lives of the living. Most specifically, they are the conventions that Mrs. Alving accepted when she stayed with Captain Alving — duty, respectability, the preservation of her husband's reputation — which have now materialized in the form of Oswald's syphilis (the literal inheritance of his father's dissolute life). More broadly, the ghosts are everything that the respectable Victorian world cannot acknowledge: sexual disease, illegitimacy, the consequences of hypocrisy. Mrs. Alving says explicitly: 'I am inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old defunct theories, all manner of old defunct beliefs, and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are, dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them.'
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