A Doll's House: History and Key Facts

A Doll's House (Danish and Bokmål: Et dukkehjem; also translated as A Doll House) is a three-act play written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 20 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. The play is set in a Norwegian town c. 1879.

The play concerns the fate of a married woman, who, at the time in Norway, lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world. Despite the fact that Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play, it was a great sensation at the time and caused a "storm of outraged controversy" that went beyond the theatre to the world of newspapers and society.

In 2006, the centennial of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the world's most-performed play that year. UNESCO has inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value.

The title of the play is most commonly translated as A Doll's House, though some scholars use A Doll House. John Simon says that A Doll's House is "the British term for what [Americans] call a 'dollhouse'". Egil Törnqvist says of the alternative title: "Rather than being superior to the traditional rendering, it simply sounds more idiomatic to Americans."

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from A Doll's House by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.