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
Peer Gynt Peer does not understand — he believes himself lost. Then he asks her: "Where has Peer Gynt been since we last met? Where was I as the one I should have been, whole and true, with the mark of God on my brow?" She answers; "In my faith, in my hope, in my love." Peer screams, calls his mother, and hides himself in her lap. Solveig sings her lullaby for him, and we might presume he dies in this last scene of the play, although there are neither stage directions nor dialogue to indicate that he actually does. Behind the