With two exceptions, the plays appear in their chronological order. The exceptions are _Love’s Comedy_, which ought by rights to come between _The Vikings_ and _The Pretenders_, and _Emperor and Galilean_, which ought to follow _The League of Youth_ instead of preceding it. The reasons of convenience which prompted these departures from the exact order are pretty obvious. It seemed highly desirable to bring the two Saga Plays, if I may so call them, into one volume; while as for _Emperor and Galilean_, it could not have been placed between _The League of Youth_ and _Pillars of Society_ save by separating its two parts, and assigning _Caesar’s Apostasy_ to Volume V., _The Emperor Julian_ to Volume VI. For the translations of all the plays in this edition, except _Love’s Comedy_ and _Brand_, I am ultimately responsible, in the sense that I have exercised an unrestricted right of revision. This means, of course, that, in plays originally translated by others, the merits of the English version belong for the most part to the original translator, while the faults may have been introduced, and must have been sanctioned, by me. The revision, whether fortunate or otherwise, has in all cases been very thorough. In their unrevised form, these translations have met with a good deal of praise and with some blame. I trust that the revision has rendered them more praiseworthy, but I can scarcely hope that it has met all the objections of those critics who have found them blameworthy. For, in some cases at any rate these objections proceeded from theories of the translator’s function widely divergent from my own—theories of which nothing, probably, could disabuse the critic’s mind, save a little experience of the difficulties of translating (as distinct from adapting) dramatic prose. Ibsen is at once extremely easy and extremely difficult to translate. It is extremely easy, in his prose plays, to realise his meaning; it is often extremely difficult to convey it in natural, colloquial, and yet not too colloquial, English. He is especially fond of laying barbed-wire entanglements for the translator’s feet, in the shape of recurrent phrases for which it is absolutely impossible to find an equivalent that will fit in all the different contexts. But this is only one of many classes of obstacles which encountered us on almost every page. I think, indeed, that my collaborators and I may take it as no small compliment that some of our critics have apparently not realised the difficulties of our task, or divined the laborious hours which have often gone to the turning of a single phrase. And, in not a few cases, the difficulties have proved sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one instance. Writing of _The Master Builder_, a very competent, and