Ibsen Plays: 1

The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), ''the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury''; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father (''Where,'' asked George Bernard Shaw, ''shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?''); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman.

Michael Meyer''s translations are ''crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana'' (Kenneth Tynan)