Peer Gynt to this book." Despite this defense of his poetic achievement in "Peer Gynt", the play was his last to employ verse; from "The League of Youth" (1869) onwards, Ibsen was to write drama only in prose. Ibsen wrote "Peer Gynt" in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its forty scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism. Raymond Williams compares "Peer Gynt" with August Strindberg's early drama "Lucky Peter's Journey" (1882) and argues that both explore a new kind
Hedda Gabler father. She then burns the manuscript and tells George she has destroyed it to secure their future. When the news comes that Eilert has indeed killed himself, George and Thea are determined to try to reconstruct his book from Eilert's notes, which Thea has kept. Hedda is shocked to discover from Judge Brack that Eilert's death, in a brothel, was messy and probably accidental; this "ridiculous and vile" death contrasts with the "beautiful and free" one that Hedda had imagined for him. Worse, Brack knows the origins of the pistol. He tells Hedda that if he reveals what he knows,