Brian Johnston (literary researcher)

Brian Peter Johnston was the second child of Edward Thomas & Hilda Margaret Johnston having an elder brother and three younger sisters. Although he never married, he had very close contact with his extended family. He left school at 13, and had several unskilled jobs including reading gas meters and removing the pips from raspberry jam. He attended college in Birmingham from where he gained a place to read classics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

In 1960, Johnston gained a First Class Honors Degree at Cambridge University, where he taught later in his life, holding a multitude of roles at Trondheim Lærerhøgskole (Norway), Northwestern University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Amman (Jordan), Beirut University College (Lebanon), and several other institutions. He joined the faculty of the School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in 1986, where he remained until his retirement in 2007.^[1]

Johnston edited the Norton Critical Edition of Ibsen's plays published in 2004. His translations of Ibsen include A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Lady from the Sea, Rosmersholm, Emperor and Galilean, and Peer Gynt. They have been produced at major professional theatres across the United States.^[2]

His course in dramatic literature from ancient to modern drama is available online on the site Courses in Drama. The essays presented derive from a Survey of Drama Course Johnston taught at Carnegie Mellon University between 1987 and 2007.^[3] His discussions, as Johnston terms his essays, are divided into four sections:

1. Greek (Athenian) Drama
2. European Drama (Medieval to Spanish Golden Age)
3. European Drama (Neoclassical to Romantic)
4. Modern Drama – (Ibsen to 20th Century; Modern Arab Drama)

A key to understanding Brian Johnston's interpretation of Ibsen is his emphasis on the importance of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's (1770–1831) influence on Ibsen's drama. In the Introduction to The Ibsen Cycle he describes his project as follows:

This book undertakes a complete revaluation and reinterpretation of Ibsen's methods and intentions as the dramatist of the twelve realistic plays from The Pillars of Society (1877) to When We Dead Awaken (1899). It follows Ibsen's description by seeing the plays as a single cycle "with mutual connections between the plays" and it demonstrates that this single cyclical structure is based upon the one great intellectual structure of reality available to Ibsen in the nineteenth century: the philosophical system of Hegel. The novelty does not lie in attributing to Hegel a strong influence upon Ibsen's thought and art, for, though by no means generally accepted by interpreters of Ibsen, this has, at least, been recognized by a number of scholars and critics from the time of John C. Pearce's essay "Hegelian Ideas in Three Tragedies by Ibsen." What is new in the present study is the discovery that the realistic plays are structured directly upon Hegel’s major philosophical work, The Phenomenology of Mind, and that the sequence of dialectical dramas in Hegel’s account of the evolution of human consciousness is paralleled in the sequence of dialectical dramas in Ibsen’s Cycle.^[4]