Ghosts

On the eve of dedicating an orphanage to her late husband's memory, Helene Alving stands guard over a lie thirty years in the making. The Captain Alving the district reveres as a pillar of virtue was, behind closed doors, a man of secret drink and dissipation — and Mrs. Alving has spent her widowhood, and most of her marriage, burying every trace of it to protect his name. The orphanage is the last stone in the monument; the clergyman who guided her, Pastor Manders, has come to bless it; and her son Oswald, a painter raised abroad, has come home for the occasion.

But the past does not stay buried. Oswald has returned not in triumph but in terror, carrying a disease inherited from the father whose virtue the whole district celebrates. The bright servant Regina turns out to be the Captain's own daughter, and Oswald's half-sister. And the doctrine of duty and respectability that Manders preaches — the doctrine that once drove Mrs. Alving back into her ruinous marriage — is revealed as the deadest ghost of all. "I almost think we are all of us ghosts," she tells the Pastor; it is not only what we inherit from our parents that walks in us, but all the dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs we cannot shake off.

Built with the retrospective precision Ibsen learned in part from Greek tragedy — almost nothing happens onstage; the action is the pitiless uncovering of what has already, irrevocably, occurred — Ghosts names on a public stage the diseases of the body and the family that polite drama existed to ignore. Denounced in 1881 as "an open drain," refused by every major theatre, and first performed not in Europe but among immigrants in Chicago, it stands today among the founding works of modern drama: the problem play that poses a question and refuses to answer it, closing on one of the most harrowing and open endings in the theatre.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation, by William Archer, in clean, readable typesetting for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.