Henrik Ibsen

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• Born: 20 March 1828
• Birthplace: Skien, Norway
• Died: 23 May 1906
• Best Known As: Norwegian "Father of Modern Drama"

Norwegian Henrik Ibsen is among the most famous modern playwrights, the author of such dramas as Peer Gynt (1867), A Doll's House (1879) and When We Dead Awaken (1899). His first play was published and performed in 1850 (Catiline), the same year he moved to Christiana (now Oslo). He traveled abroad for nearly thirty years (he lived in Rome, Dresden and Munich), wrote plays and directed a variety of theater companies. During his lifetime he earned an international reputation for his psychological dramas that frequently commented on social issues of the day. His plays are still among the most frequently performed in the world.

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Henrik Ibsen, 1870. (credit: Universitetsbiblioteket, Oslo)

(born March 20, 1828, Skien, Nor. — died May 23, 1906, Kristiania) Norwegian playwright. At age 23 he became theatre director and resident playwright of the new National Theatre at Bergen, charged with creating a "national drama." He directed the Norwegian Theatre in Kristiana from 1857 to 1863, when the theatre went bankrupt. He then set off on extended travels in Europe, beginning a self-imposed exile that would last until 1891. In Italy he wrote the troubling moral tragedy Brand (1866) and the buoyant Peer Gynt (1867). After the satire Pillars of Society (1877) he found his voice and an international audience with powerful studies of middle-class morality in A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), and Rosmersholm (1886). His more symbolic plays, most of them written after his return to Norway in 1891, include Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), and When We Dead Awaken (1899). Emphasizing character over plot, Ibsen addressed social problems such as political corruption and the changing role of women as well as psychological conflicts stemming from frustrated love and destructive family relationships. He greatly influenced European theatre and is regarded as the founder of modern prose drama.

For more information on Henrik Johan Ibsen, visit Britannica.com.

Ibsen, Henrik [Johan] (1828–1906), playwright. Probably no foreign dramas caused debate so prolonged and impassioned as did the emergence of Ibsen's Norwegian plays in the American theatre. What was the first American production of Ibsen is uncertain, but Scandinavian performers did offer the world premiere of Ghosts to Chicago and other midwestern cities in 1882, and that same year the play later known as A Doll's House was offered in English as The Child Bride, albeit given a happy ending. The same play, with a similar happy ending, was presented by Helena Modjeska as Thora in 1883. However, it fell to an 1889 production of A Doll's House, faithfully translated and given its correct name, to spread Ibsen's fame and precipitate the controversy. To the leading anti‐Ibsenite, William Winter, Ibsenism was seen as “rank, deadly pessimism . . . a disease, injurious alike to the Stage and to the Public—in as far as it affects them at all—and therefore an evil to be deprecated.” Aligned against Winter and his allies were such other leading figures as Walter Prichard Eaton, William Dean Howells, and James Huneker. The pro‐Ibsen cause was taken up by such distinguished performers as Mrs. Fiske, Alla Nazimova, and Richard Mansfield. Their appearances in Ibsen plays gained the writer such widespread acceptance that by 1908 Eaton could write, “Ibsen is one of the most popular playwrights in America today.” Mrs. Fiske had done A Doll's House (1894), Hedda Gabler (1903), and Rosmersholm (1907). Late in her career she would star in Ghosts (1927). Nazimova did Hedda Gabler (1906), A Doll's House (1907), The Master Builder (1907), and Little Eyolf (1910). In 1906 Mansfield offered Peer Gynt. Blanche Bates and Nance O'Neill offered their Heddas about the same time and Ethel Barrymore her Nora. For a while interest in and enthusiasm for Ibsen dwindled, but Eleanora Duse's performance in The Lady from the Sea sparked a revival, as did the Theatre Guild's production of Peer Gynt with Joseph Schildkraut. Eva Le Gallienne and Walter Hampden both became advocates and appeared in several major revivals. Le Gallienne was the more doggedly loyal of the two. Beginning in 1925, when she portrayed Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder, she appeared in or staged numerous mountings, including several of Hedda Gabler (1928, 1934, 1948), John Gabriel Borkman (1926, 1946), and Rosmersholm (1935). She also played Mrs. Alving in Ghosts (1948). Hampden's most notable offering was An Enemy of the People (1928, 1937). A somewhat lesser performer, Blanche Yurka, headed revivals of The Wild Duck (1925, 1928), Hedda Gabler, and The Lady from the Sea (1929).

In the 1930s and 1940s a reaction set in, prompted by the perception that the problems Ibsen dealt with were no longer those of immediate concern to contemporary American society. Probably the most interesting production of this period was Thornton Wilder's adaptation of A Doll's House (1937), which Jed Harris presented with Ruth Gordon and Paul Lukas. Ibsen's appeal waxed again in the 1950s, which saw Arthur Miller's version of An Enemy of the People (1950), Lee Strasberg's staging of Peer Gynt (1951), and the Phoenix Theatre's productions of The Master Builder (1955) and Peer Gynt (1960). In the 1960s David Ross offered a much admired cycle of Ibsen plays Off Broadway. More recently there have been fewer major mountings, though some outstanding performances in Ibsen plays were seen. Claire Bloom essayed both Nora and Hedda with success in 1971, Susannah York played the latter in 1981, and Liv Ullmann shone as Nora and Mrs. Alving in 1982. That same year there was a short‐lived musical on Broadway called A Doll's Life that attempted to show Nora's life after she walked out. Stacy Keach made a fascinating Peer Gynt in the Central Park production in 1969, while Stephen Elliott and Philip Bosco were praised as the Stockmann brothers in a Lincoln Center production of An Enemy of the People in 1971. Beatrice Straight was Mrs. Alving in a long‐running Ghosts in 1973 with a young Victor Garber commended as Osvald, and Vanessa Redgrave was the star attraction in The Lady from the Sea in 1976E. G. Marshall was quietly impressive as John Gabriel Borkman in 1980, but Janet McTeer's Nora in 1997 was a whirling dervish in a performance one either loved or loathed. The most recent Broadway Hedda was Kate Burton in 2001. The influence of Ibsen's sociological realism was immediately felt in American playwriting. James A. Herne was the first to openly acknowledge his debt, but his work was overshadowed in later decades by the plays of such writers as Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, both of whom looked to Ibsen as an exemplar.

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) developed realistic techniques that changed the entire course of Western drama. There is very little in modern drama that does not owe a debt to him.

Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in the town of Skien. His father, a businessman, went bankrupt when Ibsen was 8, a shattering blow to the family. Ibsen left home at 15, spending the next six, difficult years as a pharmacist's assistant in Grimstad, where he wrote his first play. In 1850 he moved to Christiania (Oslo) to study. In 1851 he became resident dramatist, later director, of a new theater in Bergen. Although he never became a good director and his plays were mostly unsuccessful, the years in Bergen gave him invaluable experience in practical stagecraft.

Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1857, where he spent the worst period of his life. His plays were either rejected or failures, he went into debt, and his talent was publicly questioned. He left Norway in 1864, spending the next 27 years in Italy and Germany. While bitter and humiliating personal memories explain, in part, his long exile, it seems also that only by distancing himself from everything he held dear could he devote himself completely to his art. When he left Norway, he looked like a rather dissolute bohemian. In the following years he changed his appearance, habits, and even his handwriting. He became the "Sphinx" he still is to many people - unapproachable, secretive, an avid collector of medals and honors which he wore to protect himself from the real and imagined hostility of others. Long before he returned home in 1891, he had become the world's most famous dramatist.

Early Plays

For all its youthful excesses, Catiline (1850), his first play, is remarkably Ibsenian. The theme, as Ibsen wrote later, is the discrepancy between ability and aspiration, which he called "mankind's and the individual's tragedy and comedy at the same time." Like the characters in many of Ibsen's later plays, Catiline is torn between two women who represent conflicting forces in himself: one of them embodies domestic virtues, the other his calling and, significantly, his death. Also, the play begins with words which could be uttered by many later Ibsen heroes and heroines: "I must, I must, a voice deep in my soul urges me on - and I will heed its call."

The six following plays (The Warrior's Barrow, 1850; St. John's Eve, 1853; Lady Inger of Østraat, 1855; The Feast at Solhaug, 1856; Olaf Liljekrans, 1857; and The Vikings in Helgeland, 1858) are all in the spirit of romanticism and show Ibsen struggling to find a form and techniques which would embody his personal vision. The two plays he wrote during his second stay in Christiania deserve to be better known, both for their merits and for the light they shed on Ibsen's authorship: Love's Comedy (1862), a satire on bourgeois versus romantic love, and The Pretenders (1864), a magnificent historical and psychological tragedy.

In the first 10 years of his "exile" Ibsen wrote four plays. The immensely successful Brand (1866) is a towering drama of a man who strives to realize himself in terms of SØren Kierkegaard's "either/or" and of the consequences of such an effort. His next play, Peer Gynt (1867), made Ibsen Scandinavia's most discussed dramatist. Peer Gynt is Brand's opposite, a man who evades his problems until he loses everything, including himself. Peer is Ibsen's most universally human character.

The League of Youth (1869), a political satire, shows Ibsen moving toward the later "realistic" plays. Ibsen called Emperor and Galilean (1873), a 10-act play about Julian the Apostate, "a world-historical drama." In Julian's rejection of Christianity, his futile attempt to restore the pagan cult of man, and his doomed quest to found "the third kingdom," a Hegelian synthesis of the two ways of life, Ibsen dramatized what he saw as Western man's, and his own, dilemma. The play is a failure, but one can glimpse Julian's quest beneath the polished, modern surfaces of many of Ibsen's later plays.

Plays of Contemporary Life

Inspired by the demand of the critic Georg Brandes that literature begin to take up contemporary problems for discussion, and influenced by changing public taste, Ibsen now set out to develop a dramatic form in which serious matters could be dealt with in the "trivial" guise of everyday life. Since there were models for such a drama, Ibsen cannot be said to have invented the realistic, or social reform, play. However, he brought it to perfection and, in doing so, made himself the most famous, reviled and praised dramatist of the 19th century. It should be stressed, however, that Ibsen had no intention of becoming merely a dramatist whose plays reflected contemporary manners and attacked social evils. He remained what he had always been, essentially antisociety, concerned with the individual and his problems.

Ibsen solved the technical difficulties involved in translating his tragic vision from the romantic forms to a realistic form in two central ways. First, he developed a retrospective technique whereby, as the play progresses, the past events leading to the climax are gradually brought to light through the words and acts of the characters. In Ibsen's hands (but not always in those of his followers), the past is not just dead matter: it grips the present and changes its significance. Ibsen's characters live in a continual, exciting "now," moving toward the truth about themselves and their condition.

Second, and equally important, was Ibsen's exploitation of visual imagery, whereby he gave his plays, through set, costume, and stage direction, much of the poetry denied the dramatist who deals with modern people speaking in everyday prose.

The term "Ibsenite," as used by G. B. Shaw, Ibsen's disciple and champion in England, describes a play which exposes individual and social hypocrisy. It can be used, in the narrowest sense, only about Pillars of Society (1877) and A Doll's House (1879), which do seem to stress the aspects of society and personal dishonesty that hinder personal development. But even Nora, in the latter play, is a sufficiently complex character to suggest other interpretations. Already in Ghosts (1881), however, the heroine, Mrs. Alving, discovers that the forces working against human development are not just dead social conventions: there are forces in the individual that are more elusive and destructive than the "doll house" of marriage and society. The last of the "Ibsenite" plays, An Enemy of the People (1882), takes the consequences of Mrs. Alving's discovery and laughs at the social reformer. The laughter, however, is compassionate - the hero has a certain resemblance to Ibsen himself - and the play is one of Ibsen's finest comedies.

Plays after 1882

After 1882 Ibsen concentrated more and more on the individual and his dilemma, as he had done prior to 1877, and on those timeless forces, reflected in individual psychology and working through social institutions, that hinder individual growth. The Wild Duck (1884) might be said to introduce Ibsen's last period by showing how the average man needs illusions to survive and what happens to a family when something that may be truth is introduced into it. Here Ibsen also moved toward a new symbolism, rising from and intimately bound up with his realistic surfaces.

In Rosmersholm (1886), a man raised in a tradition of Christian duty and sacrifice tries, under the influence of a free, "pagan" woman, to break with his past. The Lady from the Sea (1888) is considered a remarkable anticipation of psychotherapy, but the heroine's "cure" makes unconvincing theater. Hedda Gabler (1890) is a savage portrait of a frustrated woman, spiritually, sexually, and socially. There is, however, much of Ibsen, as he saw himself at the time, in Hedda Gabler.

With the exception of Little Eyolf (1894), the weakest of the later plays, the last plays are, to a great extent, confessional. The Master Builder (1892) is one of Ibsen's most beautiful dramas, essentially a dialogue between a guilt-burdened artist and the youth he betrayed, played against the wife and children he has "murdered" for his ambition. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), Ibsen's bleakest play, is a study of a man (he could be today's industrialist) who has sacrificed everything to his vision, until he is killed by the forces in nature he has sought to control. Glimpsed in the background, in scenes alternately comic and pathetic, is the alternative to Borkman's way of life, the life of sensual pleasure. But no synthesis seems possible of the spirit and the flesh: the "third kingdom" of which Ibsen had dreamed so long is farther away than ever.

Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), more symbolic than even those which immediately precede it, is an artist's confession of his failure as a man and of his doubts about his achievement. The play is not, however, just about the cost of great achievement: it is also about that achievement and about the man who, as Ibsen expressed it in his first words as a dramatist, hears a voice urging him on and heeds that voice. Soon after this play, Ibsen suffered a stroke that ended his career. He died on May 23, 1906.

Further Reading

Ibsen's collected works, together with all draft material, lists of English translations and criticism, and introductions by the editor, were translated in Ibsen, edited by James W. McFarlane (7 vols., 1960-70). The standard biography is by Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen (2 vols., trans. 1931). Ibsen's daughter-in-law, Bergljot Ibsen, in The Three Ibsens (trans. 1951), gives valuable information on his life. More specialized is Brian W. Downs, The Intellectual Background (1946).

On Ibsen's plays generally, George Bernard Shaw's classic The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1913) stresses the social reform aspects, and Herman J. Weigand, The Modern Ibsen: A Reconsideration (1925), emphasizes Ibsen the psychologist. John Northam, Ibsen's Dramatic Method (1953), is invaluable for the light it sheds on Ibsen's visual imagery. See also Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (1964), and Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle (1964), on Ibsen and August Strindberg and their contribution to modern drama. The prefaces to Rolf Fjelde's excellent translations of some of Ibsen's plays (Signet paperbacks) are well worth reading.

Additional Sources

Bull, Francis, Ibsen, the man and the dramatist, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.

Duve, Arne, The real drama of Henrik Ibsen?, Oslo: Lanser forl., 1977.

Gosse, Edmund, Henrik Ibsen, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978 c1907.

Jorgenson, Theodore, Henrik Ibsen: a study in art and personality, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978, 1945.

Macfall, Haldane, Ibsen: the man, his art & his significance, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978; Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1976.

Shafer, Yvonne, Henrik Ibsen: life, work, and criticism, Fredericton, N.B., Canada: York Press, 1985.

Ibsen, Henrik (Skien, 1828-1906, Oslo), the Norwegian dramatist, spent the most influential period of his life in Germany, living in Munich and Dresden from 1864 to 1891. The plays written before his voluntary exile from Norway were almost all historical. Soon after his arrival in Germany he wrote two verse dramas of epic proportions, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867). In 1877 he published his first play dealing with contemporary society, Samfundets støtter (Stützen der Gesellschaft, Pillars of Society), which was performed in Germany and Austria in 1878 without making any deep impression. There followed a series of bitter satirical comedies and harsh tragedies expressed in a strikingly realistic idiom. They comprise Et dukkehjem (1879, Nora or Ein Puppenheim in German, A Doll's House), Gengangere (1881, Gespenster, Ghosts), En folksfiende (1882, Ein Volksfeind, An Enemy of the People), Vildanden (1884, Die Wildente, The Wild Duck), Rosmers-holm (1886), Fruen fra havet (1888, Die Frau vom Meere, The Lady from the Sea), and Hedda Gabler (1890). These were translated and performed in Germany, but it was not until 1887 that Ibsen made his full impact on the German theatre and public as the foremost pioneer of Naturalism (see Naturalismus). His plays became the subject of exaggerated propaganda on the one hand, and of savage abuse on the other.

A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People, and Pillars of Society were the most frequently performed. Ghosts was chosen as a controversial work for the first performance by the Freie Bühne in 1889. Though Ibsen's social plays were a reflection of peculiarly Norwegian conditions, they came to be regarded as characteristic portrayals of the European bourgeoisie. His later symbolical plays, from Bygmester Solness (1896, Baumeister Solneß, The Master Builder) to Når vi døde vägner (1899, Wenn wir Toten aufwachen, When we Dead awaken), were for some time regarded in Germany as evidence of failing powers.

Quotes:

"The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority."

"It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn."

"Castles in the air - -they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build as well."

"Ah, I fancy it is just the same with most of what you call your emancipation. You have read yourself into a number of new ideas and opinions. You have got a sort of smattering of recent discoveries in various fields -- discoveries that seem to overthrow certain principles which have hitherto been held impregnable and unassailable. But all this has only been a matter of intellect, Miss West -- superficial acquisition. It has not passed into your blood."

"A forest bird never wants a cage."

"People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it."

See more famous quotes by Henrik Ibsen

This article is about the Norwegian playwright and poet. For other persons named Ibsen, see Ibsen (disambiguation).

Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen in 1900
Born	Henrik Johan Ibsen 20 March 1828(1828-03-20) Skien, Norway
Died	23 May 1906 (aged 78) Christiania (Oslo), Norway
Occupation	Playwright, poet, theatre director
Nationality	Norwegian
Genres	Realism
Notable work(s)	Peer Gynt (1867) A Doll's House (1879) Ghosts (1881) The Wild Duck (1884) Hedda Gabler (1890)
Influences Kierkegaard · Brandes
Influenced Chekhov · Stanislavski · Shaw · Brandes · Antoine · Lugné-Poe · Freud · Joyce · Miller · Williams · Ray

Henrik Johan Ibsen (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈhɛnɾɪk ˈɪpsən]; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father" of modern drama and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre.^[1] His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition, alongside Shakespeare.

Contents 1 Family and youth 2 Life and writings 3 Death 3.1 Centenary 4 Works 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

Family and youth

Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, a relatively well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien, Norway, which was primarily noted for shipping timber. He was a descendant of some of the oldest and most distinguished families of Norway, including the Paus family. Ibsen later pointed out his distinguished ancestors and relatives in a letter to Georg Brandes. Shortly after his birth his family's fortunes took a significant turn for the worse. His mother turned to religion for solace, and his father began to suffer from severe depression. The characters in his plays often mirror his parents, and his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society.^{[citation needed]}

At fifteen, Ibsen left home. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, a liaison with a servant produced an illegitimate child, whom he later rejected. While Ibsen did pay some child support for fourteen years, he never met his illegitimate son, who ended up as a poor blacksmith. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catiline (1850), was published under the pseudonym "Brynjolf Bjarme", when he was only 22, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful.^{[citation needed]}

Life and writings

He spent the next several years employed at the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen, where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period he did not publish any new plays of his own. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.^{[citation needed]}

Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of Christiania's National Theater. He married Suzannah Thoresen the same year and she gave birth to their only child, Sigurd. The couple lived in very poor financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway. In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He was not to return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was to be as a noted playwright, however controversial.^{[citation needed]}

His next play, Brand (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Ibsen's next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.^[2][3]

With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas". His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.^{[citation needed]}

Portrait circa 1870

Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and published A Doll's House in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the acceptance of traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.^{[citation needed]}

Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts (1881), another scathing commentary on Victorian morality, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her then fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But she was not to receive the result she was promised. Her husband's philandering continued right up until his death, and the result is that her son is syphilitic. Even the mention of venereal disease was scandalous, but to show that even a person who followed society's ideals of morality had no protection against it, that was beyond scandalous.^{[citation needed]}

In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. The Victorian belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen chastised not only the right wing or 'Victorian' elements of society, but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of Ghosts. The protagonist is a doctor, a pillar of the community. The town is a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water used by the bath is being contaminated when it seeps through the grounds of a local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor, due to the community's unwillingness to face reality.^{[citation needed]}

As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against the Victorians, but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always the iconoclast, Ibsen was equally willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.^{[citation needed]}

The Wild Duck (1884) is considered by many to be Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.^{[citation needed]}

Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.^{[citation needed]}

Letter from Ibsen to his English reviewer and translator Edmund Gosse: "30.8.[18]99. Dear Mr. Gosse! It was to me a hearty joy to receive your letter. So I will finally personal meet you and your wife. I am at home every day in the morning until 1 o'clock. I am happy and surprised of your excellent Norwegian! Yours friendly obliged Henrik Ibsen."

Interestingly, late in his career Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of Victorian morality. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of Victorian conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic, and even clichéd, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. Hedda has a few similarities with the character of Nora in A Doll's House, but many of today's audiences and theater critics^[who?] feel that Hedda's intensity and drive are much more complex and much less comfortably explained than what they view as rather routine feminism on the part of Nora.^{[citation needed]}

Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.^{[citation needed]}

Death

On 23 May 1906, Ibsen died in Christiania (now Oslo) after a series of strokes. When his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen sputtered "On the contrary" and then died.^[4]

Ibsen was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo.^{[citation needed]}

Centenary

In 2007, the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death was commemorated in Norway and many other countries, and the year was dubbed the "Ibsen year" by Norwegian authorities.^{[citation needed]}

On 23 May 2006, the occasion of the hundred-year commemoration of Ibsen's death, the Ibsen Museum reopened a completely restored writer's house with the original interior, colors, and decor.^{[citation needed]}

Also in May 2006, a biographical puppet production of Ibsen's life named The Death of Little Ibsen debuted at New York City's Sanford Meisner Theater.^{[citation needed]}

Works

1850 Catiline (Catilina) 1850 The Burial Mound also known as The Warrior's Barrow (Kjæmpehøjen) 1851 Norma (Norma) 1852 St. John's Eve (Sancthansnatten) 1854 Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad) 1855 The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug) 1856 Olaf Liljekrans (Olaf Liljekrans) 1857 The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland) 1862 Digte - only released collection of poetry, included "Terje Vigen". 1862 Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie) 1863 The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne) 1866 Brand (Brand) 1867 Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt)

1869 The League of Youth (De unges Forbund) 1873 Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer) 1877 Pillars of Society (Samfundets Støtter) 1879 A Doll's House (Et Dukkehjem) 1881 Ghosts (Gengangere) 1882 An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende) 1884 The Wild Duck (Vildanden) 1886 Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm) 1888 The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet) 1890 Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler) 1892 The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness) 1894 Little Eyolf (Lille Eyolf) 1896 John Gabriel Borkman (John Gabriel Borkman) 1899 When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vaagner)

See also

Problem play Realism

Literature portal Naturalism Nineteenth-century theatre

Notes

1. ^ On Ibsen's role as "father of modern drama," see "Ibsen Celebration to Spotlight 'Father of Modern Drama'". Bowdoin College. 2007-01-23. http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/events/archives/003725.shtml. Retrieved 2007-03-27. ; on Ibsen's relationship to modernism, see Moi (2006, 1-36).
2. ^ Shapiro, Bruce. Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox. (1990) ISBN 9780313272905
3. ^ Downs, Brian. Ibsen: The Intellectual Background (1946)
4. ^ Henrik Ibsen - on the contrary

References

• Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth A Commentary on the Works of Henrik Ibsen (New York: Macmillan, 1894)
• Koht, Halvdan. The Life of Ibsen translated by Ruth Lima McMahon and Hanna Astrup Larsen. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1931.
• Lucas, F. L. The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg, Cassell, London, 1962. A useful introduction, giving the biographical background to each play and detailed play-by-play summaries and discussion for the theatre-goer (including the less well-known plays).
• Ferguson, Robert. Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography. Richard Cohen Books, London, 1996.
• Meyer, Michael. Ibsen. History Press Ltd., Stroud, 2004.
• Moi, Toril. 2006. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 9780199202591.
• Haugan, Jørgen. Henrik Ibsens Metode:Den Indre Utvikling Gjennem Ibsens Dramatikk ( Norwegian: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. 1977)

Further reading

• Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays ( Rolf G. Fjelde, translator. Plume: 1978)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Henrik Ibsen

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Henrik Ibsen

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Henrik Ibsen

• The Ibsen Society of America Official Website
• Ibsen Studies The only international academic journal devoted to Ibsen
• Online course by Ibsen scholar Brian Johnston author of The Ibsen Cycle and To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Drama
• Extensive resource in several languages from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Works by or about Henrik Ibsen at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by Henrik Ibsen at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Henrik Ibsen at Project Gutenberg (the biography by Edmund Gosse)
• Henrik Ibsen - A Bibliography of Criticism and Biography, by Ina Ten Eyck Firkins, from Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Henrik Ibsen in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• "Ibsen and His Discontents" - a critical, conservative view of Ibsen's works, written by Theodore Dalrymple

v • d • e Works by Henrik Ibsen Catiline (1850) · The Burial Mound (Kjæmpehøjen) (1850) · Norma (1851) · St. John's Eve (Sancthansnatten) (1852) · Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad) (1854) · The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug) (1855) · Olaf Liljekrans (1856) · The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland) (1857) · Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie) (1862) · The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne) (1863) · Brand (1865) · Peer Gynt (1867) · The League of Youth (De unges Forbund) (1869) · Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer) (1873) · The Pillars of Society (Samfundets støtter) (1877) · A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem) (1879) · Ghosts (Gengangere) (1881) · An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende) (1882) · The Wild Duck (Vildanden) (1884) · Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm) (1886) · The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra havet) (1888) · Hedda Gabler (1890) · The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness) (1892) · Little Eyolf (1894) · John Gabriel Borkman (1896) · When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vågner) (1899)

Persondata
NAME	Ibsen, Henrik Johann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Norwegian playwright
DATE OF BIRTH	20 March 1828(1828-03-20)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Skien, Norway
DATE OF DEATH	23 May 1906
PLACE OF DEATH	Kristiania

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