Henrik Ibsen

Life

Henrik Ibsen was born in March 1828 in Skien, a small port town in southern Norway, into a merchant family that fell into financial difficulty during his childhood. At fifteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary in the town of Grimstad, where he stayed six years, wrote his first play, and fathered an illegitimate son whom he supported but never acknowledged publicly. He failed the entrance examination for the university in Christiania (now Oslo) and turned instead to the theater.

From 1851 he worked as a writer and stage manager at the new Norwegian Theater in Bergen and later as director of the Christiania Norwegian Theater, learning the practical craft of the stage while producing a series of plays on Norwegian historical and legendary subjects. The theater failed in 1862. In 1864, discouraged and in debt, Ibsen left Norway on a travel grant and lived abroad, in Italy and Germany, for the next twenty-seven years. The verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) made his name in Scandinavia.

In the late 1870s he turned to prose plays about contemporary middle-class life. The Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), and Hedda Gabler (1890) made him the most controversial and most discussed dramatist in Europe. He returned to Norway in 1891, wrote his last plays there, suffered a series of strokes from 1900, and died in Christiania in May 1906.

Literary significance

Ibsen is often called the father of modern drama. His prose plays brought the problems of ordinary families, inherited disease, political corruption, and the position of women onto a stage that had been dominated by melodrama and historical spectacle, and he did it with a tight structure in which secrets from the past force a reckoning in the present. His influence on later playwrights, from Shaw and Chekhov onward, is hard to overstate, and his plays are performed worldwide more than those of any other dramatist except Shakespeare.

Where to start

A Doll’s House is the best-known of his plays, short and sharply built, and is the one in our catalog. Readers who respond to it can go on to Ghosts and Hedda Gabler.