attitudes toward the play of Zionist Jews and assimilated Jews. He bases his description of the production on the German translation that was used and, primarily, on the annotated script of the actor who played Hjalmar.  The main focus of his description is a consideration of how the play could be used to express the situation of the Jews under Nazi oppression, but he also also pays some attention to developing an interpretation of the play in which it is Hjalmar’s tragedy because although he eventually manages to rid himself of his theatricality he does so too late to prevent Hedvig’s death.
            The selection of Ibsen letters edited by Philip E. Larson and Bo Elbrønd-Bek (11) consists of the 71 more substantial letters and other signed documents out of the 130 such items that have been discovered since the last major collection of Ibsen’s letters, the one edited by Øyvind Anker in 1979. A few of the letters are of considerable interest. Some examples: On December 7, 1846, Ibsen reluctantly informed the magistrate of the county court in Grimstad that he could not deny being the father of the son born to Else Sophie Jensdatter, despite her sexual involvement with other men during the period concerned, since he did unfortunately practice physical intercourse with her; he blames it on her “tempting behavior” and their being in service together.  On June 16, 1870, he described himself as knowing nothing about music but also claimed to have a deep feeling for it.  On Christmas Eve, 1881, he thanked Erik Bøgh for his favorable review of Ghosts and commented on the outraged reception it met with from most of the other reviewers. On May 25, 1890, he informed his Dutch translator: “The Bøjg, I think, should preferably be represented as gray, solid, tumbling masses of mist. A proficient scenery painter and machinist will be able to represent this with the help of a flexible silk fabric [bevægelig flortæppe].” The letters are thoroughly annotated with detailed information about the addressees, people mentioned in the letters, and, as needed, the occasions of the letters. The annotations will make this publication useful well beyond the value of the letters included.
           Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife argues that“the entire range of conflicts and tensions on which Ibsen’s dramatic oeuvre is predicated consistently collapses into the question of [the] putative harmonizing of happiness and duty,” but in none of the plays is there any reconciliation between them (12).  She provides a very fine analysis of Brand to “demonstrate how this elusive reconciliation precisely defines the hero’s agonistic struggle,” but for me the most interesting material in her essay is her examination of “the contours of the moral space which [Ibsen’s] characters inhabit, and in which happiness and duty provide the moral matrix for their attempts to discover how to live.” This examination involves a considera-

tion of the “Enlightenment project” of isolating “morality from both theology and teleology,” especially Kant’s contributions to the project, and to a distinction between the world of ancient Greece, in which motivation and identity derived from the heroic code as developed by tradition, and Ibsen’s world, in which motivation and identity derive from a “self-addressed injunction,” as in Catiline’s “I must!  I must!  / Deep down within my soul a voice commands, and I will do its bidding.”  What “we see on Ibsen’s stage,” she writes, “is the agony of individuals who are most fully themselves when they realise that they cannot ultimately sustain a conception of the autotelic self, and that the formalism which requires such a self can only issue directives and form policies, and is no reliable guide to what to value in life, and the tragedy is at its rawest when the heroes are forced to confront the question of the legitimacy of their personal moralities, which they finally begin to acknowledge as having no status beyond that of creations of the will.”               Christine Kiebuzinska’s essay on Elfriede Jelinek’s “Nora project” (13) provides an interesting analysis of the Austrian writer’s 1979 play Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stützen der Gesellschaften, which mixes a “deconstruction” of Ibsen’s A Doll House with “linguistic ‘readymades’ from popular scandal sheets, advertisements, television talk shows, soap opera and popular film” in order to superimpose “a strong materialist feminist reading on a range of contemporary issues: the demythification of canonical texts that adhere to the fictions of everyday life, the continuity of patriarchal structures in capitalist market economies, and the limitations of utopian individualism in feminist myths.” 
             Marie Wells’s essay on Ghosts and Rosmersholm (14) seeks to show “that while liberation from dead values in Ibsen’s plays becomes ever more necessary, Ibsen makes the value of that liberation ever more ambiguous.”  In Ghosts Mrs. Alving manages to free herself from society’s values and comes to embrace the concept of livsglæde, but when she is faced at the end of the play “with the most agonizing moral problem imaginable” she “has no source of moral authority to which she can turn for guidance,” and the concept she has embraced is tainted by its also being associated with Regine.  The account of Rosmersholm is less clearly worked out and seems to me somewhat confused on certain points.  The values that Rebecca West holds and apparently needs to get rid of are “the radical ideas she inherited from Dr. West.”  These values “acquire an increasingly negative colour” because of the sexual morals of Dr. West, because they make Rebecca a meddler who drives Beata to suicide and causes Rosmer’s downfall, and because they fail to provide a “bulwark against the overwhelming sexual passion for Rosmer” that eventually leads to her own destroyed happiness.In the end she evidently adopts the