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
The Master Builder Builder" can be taken as one of realism: the destructive outcome of a middle-aged, professional man's infatuation with a younger, teasing woman or, as critic Desmond MacCarthy describes this concept of the work: the tragedy of an "elderly architect who falls off his scaffold while trying to show off before a young lady". If, however, one takes Solness's belief in his powers at their face value, the play also can be a lyrical and poetic fairy tale, in the manner of "Peer Gynt" travelling the Earth in his magical adventures while the faithful Solveig waits for his return. On stage,