Peer Gynt Peer Gynt Peer Gynt (; ) is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen published in 1867. Written in Danish—the common written language of Denmark and Norway in Ibsen's lifetime—it is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Ibsen believed "Per Gynt", the Norwegian fairy tale on which the play is loosely based, to be rooted in fact, and several of the characters are modelled after Ibsen's own family, notably his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845 ("Huldre-Eventyr
Peer Gynt lovers – the deeply committed Solveig and the superficial Peer, who is more a surface for projections than a coherent character. The simplest conclusion one may draw from "Peer Gynt", is expressed in the eloquent prose of the author: “"If you lie; are you real?"” The literary critic Harold Bloom of New York University in his book "The Western Canon" has challenged the conventional reading of "Peer Gynt", stating:Far more than Goethe's Faust, Peer is the one nineteenth-century literary character who has the largeness of the grandest characters of Renaissance imaginings. Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hugo, even Balzac have no single