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Table of Contents Background Information HENRIK IBSEN Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and poet. He was born in Skein, Norway, on March 20, 1928. Because his father's business failed, Henrik had to spend his childhood and youth in abject poverty. In 1844, he left Skein for Grimstad to become an apothecary's apprentice, hoping to later study medicine. In 1855, Ibsen left for Christiania to join the university, but he failed the entrance examination. He, therefore, turned his attention to writing. At nineteen, he was producing poetry, and he completed his first play, Catilene, when he was twenty-two. A year later, he joined a theater company, where he wrote and directed several plays. He also designed costumes for the stage artists. In 1857, he was appointed manager of the National Theater at Christiania. In 1858, Ibsen married Susannah Thoresen, and they had one son; but his writing career continued. In 1862, he wrote Love's Comedy, a drama in epigrammatic verse; it was followed by The Pretenders in 1863. The theater for which Ibsen was working, however, went bankrupt; therefore, he could not stage any of his plays during this period. In 1864, the Prussian-Danish war broke out, and Ibsen left Norway for Italy. Thereafter, except for short visits to his native land, he lived in Italy and Germany until 1891. After his emigration to Rome at the age of thirty-six, Ibsen wrote two poetic plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867). These plays established Ibsen's reputation as a well-known dramatist. In 1869, he wrote The League of Youth, a prose play; Ibsen never returned to dramatic verse. During this period, the Norwegian government offered Ibsen a poet's pension, but he rejected it. He was bitter because the pension was not offered when he was in need of financial support; he had often had to borrow money from his friends in order to live and work as a playwright.
In 1877, Ibsen wrote The Pillars of Society, considered to be the first of his twelve great modern plays. As well as making him famous in Germany, the play was also translated into English and became his first drama to be staged in London. Ibsen returned from England to Rome in 1878 and completed A Doll's House in 1879. This play firmly established Ibsen's international reputation. Ghosts, written in 1881, created considerable controversy, and the theater-owners rejected producing it; it was finally performed in Chicago. Other of his well-known plays are An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), and The Lady from the Sea (1888). In 1889, when he was sixty-one years old, Ibsen fell in love with an eighteen-year old girl; they corresponded for nearly twelve months. His attraction to her left an indelible mark on Ibsen's later plays: Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899). Ibsen's seventieth birthday was celebrated in 1898. A year later the National Norwegian Theater was dedicated in his honor. Then in 1901, Ibsen suffered a paralytic stroke, preventing him from further literary creation. He died on May 23, 1906, at the age of seventy-eight. Today he is recognized as the forerunner of modern theater and Norway's greatest dramatist. Table of Contents | |
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