Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in Stockmanngården, a merchant house in the small timber port of Skien in southern Norway ^[1]. His father, Knud Ibsen, was a trader whose business collapsed when Henrik was about seven years old. The family gave up its town house and moved to a modest farm at Venstøp outside Skien, a fall in status that marked the boy deeply and that scholars have long traced through the bankrupt patriarchs and anxious households of his later plays ^[2].

At fifteen Ibsen left home for the coastal town of Grimstad, where he worked as an apprentice in an apothecary shop ^[1]. The years in Grimstad were narrow and poor. In 1846, when he was eighteen, a servant in the household, Else Sophie Jensdatter, gave birth to his son Hans Jacob, and Ibsen paid support for the child for years without ever forming a relationship with him ^[2]. During the same period he read for the university entrance examination on his own, followed the European revolutions of 1848 with excitement, and began writing verse.

His first play, Catilina, a drama about the Roman conspirator, was written in Grimstad and published in 1850 under the pen name Brynjolf Bjarme ^[1]. It sold almost nothing. That spring Ibsen moved to Christiania (now Oslo) to sit the university examination, failed in Greek and arithmetic, and abandoned formal study for writing. A short piece, The Burial Mound, became the first Ibsen play ever staged when the Christiania Theatre performed it in September 1850 ^[3].

In 1851 the violinist Ole Bull, who had founded a Norwegian-language theatre in Bergen, hired the twenty three year old Ibsen as resident dramatist and stage manager ^[3]. The post came with an obligation to write one new play a year and, more usefully, with daily practical work: casting, blocking, scenery, budgets. Over six years in Bergen, Ibsen helped mount well over a hundred productions and absorbed the mechanics of the stage from the inside, an education few dramatists of his century received ^[2].

He returned to the capital in 1857 to direct the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania. The following year he married Suzannah Thoresen, a strong-minded reader who became his lifelong intellectual ally; their only child together, Sigurd, was born in 1859 ^[1]. Professionally the period was grim. The theatre went bankrupt in 1862, Ibsen fell into debt and heavy drinking, and his early national-romantic plays on Norwegian history and folklore earned little money and mixed reviews ^[2].

A turning point came with Love's Comedy in 1862 and the historical drama The Pretenders in 1863, which showed a sharper, more personal voice. Armed with a small state travel grant, Ibsen left Norway in 1864, angry at his country's failure to aid Denmark in the war over Schleswig ^[1]. He settled first in Rome. The self-imposed exile that followed lasted twenty seven years, spent mainly in Italy and Germany, and it was abroad that he wrote nearly all the work for which he is remembered ^[3].

The verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), both written in Italy, made Ibsen famous across Scandinavia ^[1]. Brand, the story of an uncompromising priest, won him a poet's salary from the Norwegian parliament, ending decades of poverty. Peer Gynt, a sprawling fantasy about a self-deceiving opportunist, later gained a second life through the incidental music Edvard Grieg composed for its 1876 staging ^[3].

The achievements that changed world theatre came next, when Ibsen turned from verse to tight prose plays about contemporary middle-class life. A Doll's House (1879) ends with Nora Helmer walking out on her husband and children, a door slam that provoked furious debate about marriage and women's independence across Europe ^[4]. Ghosts (1881) touched venereal disease, inherited guilt, and euthanasia, and was widely denounced as obscene before becoming a classic. An Enemy of the People (1882) answered his critics with the story of a doctor punished for telling an inconvenient truth about a town's polluted baths ^[1].

In later plays such as The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), and Hedda Gabler (1890), Ibsen deepened his psychological method, building dialogue in which the past surfaces gradually and characters ruin themselves through illusions they cannot abandon ^[4]. Asked what Henrik Ibsen achievements amount to, historians of drama usually answer that he established serious prose realism as the dominant mode of the modern stage. George Bernard Shaw promoted him in England with The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891, and James Joyce, still a student, published an admiring essay on him in 1900 ^[5].

Ibsen's marriage to Suzannah Thoresen lasted from 1858 until his death. Contemporaries described the household as formal and quiet, organized entirely around his writing routine, yet Suzannah's judgment shaped his work; she pushed him to keep writing during the worst years in Christiania and defended the endings of his most controversial plays ^[2]. Their son Sigurd Ibsen became a lawyer and statesman who served as Norwegian prime minister in Stockholm during the union with Sweden, and he married Bergljot Bjørnson, daughter of Ibsen's great rival and friend Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson ^[1].

The playwright himself was a creature of habit, famous in Munich and later in Christiania for appearing at the same café table at the same hour each day, dressed with severe correctness and wearing his decorations ^[2]. He guarded his privacy, gave few interviews, and answered attacks mainly through his plays. In old age he formed sentimental friendships with much younger women, including the Viennese Emilie Bardach, whom he met at Gossensass in 1889; biographers connect these late attachments to the aging artists and young muses of his final dramas ^[2].

For readers of Henrik Ibsen facts, one detail is telling: he kept a small portrait of the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, his fiercest antagonist, above his desk, reportedly saying that he could not write without those mad eyes watching him ^[6].

Ibsen returned to Norway for good in 1891, settling in Christiania as a national institution rather than the angry exile who had left in 1864 ^[1]. The plays of this last decade turned inward. The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899) examine aging men, artists and financiers, who look back on lives sacrificed to ambition ^[4]. He labelled the final play a dramatic epilogue, and it proved to be exactly that.

His seventieth birthday in 1898 brought celebrations in Christiania, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, banquets and honors that confirmed his standing as Scandinavia's most famous living writer ^[3]. Gyldendal began issuing a collected edition of his works the same year.

A stroke in 1900 ended his writing life, and further strokes left him largely incapacitated. Henrik Ibsen died at his home in Christiania on May 23, 1906, at the age of seventy eight, and the Norwegian state gave him a public funeral ^[1]. A story told by those near him at the end records that when a nurse remarked he seemed a little better, he answered with a single dry contradiction, though accounts of the exact deathbed words vary ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Henrik Ibsen soon meets the standard claim: after Shakespeare he is among the most performed dramatists in the world, and A Doll's House has been staged in nearly every theatre culture on earth ^[3]. His method, the so-called retrospective technique in which buried secrets drive present action, shaped writers as different as Shaw, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, and the film and television drama that followed them ^[4].

His influence reached beyond the stage. Feminist movements adopted Nora's exit as an emblem decades before Ibsen's death, even though he insisted at a banquet of the Norwegian Women's Rights League in 1898 that he had written about humanity rather than campaigning for any cause ^[1]. Sigmund Freud analyzed Rosmersholm in a 1916 essay on character types, and Ibsen's dissection of self-deception remains a touchstone in psychology and literary criticism alike ^[5].

In Norway his memory is institutional. The manuscripts of his plays were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2001, Oslo's main street leads past the Ibsen Museum in his last apartment, and the International Ibsen Award, funded by the Norwegian government, ranks among the richest theatre prizes anywhere ^[7]. The centenary of his death in 2006 saw thousands of productions and events worldwide, a scale of commemoration few writers of any language have received ^[3].