Of the three plays in this volume, "Ghosts" and "A Public Enemy" are social dramas of his middle period; and the former, described by one London critic as "an open sewer, " raised the greatest outcry of all Ibsen's attacks on convention. "When We Dead Wake," his last play, handles in a symbolic manner the individual's inner conflict and, incidentally, provides the dramatist's own comment on his lifework and his renunciation of work.