Hello and welcome to this episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about an enemy of the people by Henrik Ibsen,

an absolute titan of his age in terms of the playwrights and what's more as well,

hitherto his coming in the Victorian era, by far in the way,

the most famous playwright to come from Norway, or probably since as well, Henrik Inson is an incredibly

famous writer and a writer that had a profound effect on the world around him. He was deeply

controversial at his time and I will openly admit that some of his writing is deeply subversive, deeply, deeply

subversive when you take an example of a play such as a doll's house that I did consider

covering, but I wanted to start with a play where you can actually see more of the

based coming through in Ibsen's thinking

so that we didn't simply go into the school curriculum of subversion,

which Adol's house is obviously a part of.

So an enemy of the people.

Now, this play was written in 1882.

He wrote it in about nine weeks and a lot of the structure of the play

and its critiques and its argumentation is very much Ibsen basically trying to argue back at the

critics who disliked his previous work which was Ghosts. And Ibsen was writing at a time in Norwegian history

when, much like everywhere else in Europe at the time, a lot of social change was going on.

You had a burgeoning middle class, and with this, with more money, more opportunities, you had a also growing sense of what

would just be termed self-realization, right, that actually with this money, with this agency,

you know, in the modern world, in budding modernity, actually individualism, individuality, were very, very important, and it was

through discovery and action as individuals that we are best able to arrive at truth. And this is

something that the play deals with very, very masterfully. And what's more as well, one of the reasons why it is such a

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