Hedda Gabler (Student Editions)

Hedda Gabler is an intelligent and ambitious woman, trapped in a stifling, bourgeois, 19th\-century marriage in which she has no means of finding personal fulfillment. Having been too frightened of scandal to become involved with a brilliant, wayward writer, she opts instead for a conventional but loveless marriage in the hope of finding surrogate satisfaction through her husband\x27s academic career. However, when her previous lover, the writer Eilert Loevborg, returns to Hedda\x27s life with a masterpiece that might threaten her husband\x27s career, Hedda decides to take drastic and fatal action. Universally condemned in 1890 when it was written, Hedda Gabler <\/i>has subsequently become one of Ibsen\x27s most performed and studied plays. Blending comedy and tragedy, Ibsen probes the thwarted aspirations and hidden anxieties of his characters against a backdrop of contemporary social conditions and attitudes. This Methuen Drama Student Edition is published in the classic translation by Michael Meyer, with commentary and notes by Sophie Duncan, offering a contemporary lens on the play\x27s gender politics and considers key productions of the play into the 21st century with iconic actresses in the title role, including Maggie Smith, Janet Suzmann, Harriet Walter, Sheridan Smith and Ruth Wilson.