Henrik Ibsen

:"Ibsen" redirects here. For other people named Ibsen, see Ibsen (disambiguation)."Infobox Writer
name = Henrik Ibsen
birthname = Henrik Johan Ibsen

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caption =
pseudonym = Brynjolf Bjarme (early works)
birthdate = birth date|df=yes|1828|3|20
birthplace = Skien, Norway
deathdate = death date and age|df=yes|1906|5|23|1828|3|20
deathplace = Kristiania (Oslo), Norway
occupation = Playwright, poet, theatre director
nationality = Norwegian
genre = Social Realism
notableworks = Peer Gynt (1867) A Doll's House (1879) Ghosts (1881) The Wild Duck (1884) Hedda Gabler (1890)
influences = Kierkegaard, Brandes
influenced = Social Realism, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Georg Brandes, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Arthur Miller, Raymond Williams

Henrik Johan Ibsen (pronounced|ˈhɛnɾɪk ˈɪpsən; 20 March 1828–23 May 1906) was a major Norwegian playwright of realistic drama. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and is one of the founders of modernism in the theatre. [On Ibsen's role as "father of modern drama," see cite web|url=http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/events/archives/003725.shtml|title=Ibsen Celebration to Spotlight 'Father of Modern Drama'|publisher=Bowdoin College|date=2007-01-23|accessdate=2007-03-27; on Ibsen's relationship to modernism, see Moi (2006, 1-36).] Alongside Knut Hamsun, Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians, and one of the most important playwrights of all time. [cite web|url=http://ibsen.net/index.gan?id=83|title=Ibsen.net (English version)|publisher=National Library of Oslo with funding from the Norwegian government|accessdate=2007-03-27]

His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries.

Ibsen introduced a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Victorian-era plays were expected to be moral dramas with noble protagonists pitted against darker forces; every drama was expected to result in a morally-appropriate conclusion, meaning that goodness was to bring happiness, and immorality pain. Ibsen challenged this notion and the beliefs of his times and shattered the illusions of his audiences.

Family and youth

Henrik 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 suffering 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.

At fifteen, Ibsen left home. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, together with a servant, he fathered an illegitimate child whom he 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 cast off 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 "Catilina" (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 he was not to write again for some years.

Life and writings

He spent the next several years employed at the Norwegian Theater 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.

Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of Christiania's National Theater. He married Susannah 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.

His next play, "Brand" (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was his next play, "Peer Gynt" (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed the incidental music. 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". Subsequently, Ibsen's next play "Peer Gynt" was consciously informed by Kierkegaard. [Shapiro, Bruce. "Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox". (1990) ISBN 9780313272905] [Downs, Brian. "Ibsen: The Intellectual Background" (1946)]

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.

" in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the blind acceptance of traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.

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. Hers was not the noble life which Victorians believed would result from fulfilling one's duty rather than following one's desires. Those idealized beliefs were only the "Ghosts" of the past, haunting the present.

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.

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.

"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. And while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.

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.

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. There are a few similarities between Hedda and the character of Nora in "A Doll's House", but many of today's audiences and theatre critics 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.

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.

Death

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

He was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund (meaning "The graveyard of our savior") in central Oslo. In 2006 the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death was commemorated in Norway and many other countries, and the year dubbed the "Ibsen year" by Norwegian authorities. On the occasion of the hundred-year commemoration of Ibsen's death, 23 May 1906, the Ibsen Museum reopened a completely restored writer's home with the original interior, original colours and decor. In May 2006 also a biographical puppet production of Ibsen's life named 'The Death of Little Ibsen' debuted at New York City's Sanford Meisner Theater.

List of 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")

ee also

* Problem play
* Realism
* Naturalism
* Nineteenth-century theatre

Notes

References

* Ferguson, Robert. "Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography". Richard Cohen Books, London, 1996.

* Koht, Halvdan. "The Life of Ibsen" translated by Ruth Lima McMahon and Hanna Astrup Larsen. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1931.

* 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.

External links

* [http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/i/ibsen/henrik/ Works by Ibsen] at [http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au ebooks @ Adelaide]
* [http://www.informaworld.com/sibs Ibsen Studies] The only international academic journal devoted to Ibsen
* [http://www.exploreibsen.com Explore Ibsen - a virtual walk]
* [http://www.ibsen.net/?id=83 Ibsen.net - All about Ibsen]
* [http://www.ibsenvoyages.com Online course by Ibsen scholar Brian Johnston author of "The Ibsen Cycle" and "To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Drama"]
* [http://www.ibsenworldwide.info/ Extensive resource in several languages from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs]
* [http://www.nb.no/baser/ibsen/english.html The International Ibsen Bibliography]
* [http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A(texts)%20-contributor%3Agutenberg%20AND%20(subject%3A%22Ibsen%2C%20Henrik%2C%201828-1906%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Ibsen%2C%20Henrik%2C%201828-1906%22%20OR%20creator%3AHenrik%20Ibsen) Works by or about Henrik Ibsen] at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
* (plain text and HTML)
* (the biography by Edmund Gosse)
* [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17719 Henrik Ibsen - A Bibliography of Criticism and Biography] , by Ina Ten Eyck Firkins, from Project Gutenberg
* [http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/ibsen Online editions of plays, in Danish]
* [http://runeberg.org/ibsen/ Henrik Ibsens samlede værker] , collected works freely available at Project Runeberg
*
* [http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-isben.html "Ibsen and His Discontents"] - a critical, conservative view of Ibsen's works, written by Theodore Dalrymple

Persondata
NAME= Ibsen, Henrik Johann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION= Norwegian playwright
DATE OF BIRTH= birth date|df=yes|1828|3|20
PLACE OF BIRTH= Skien, Norway
DATE OF DEATH= death date|df=yes|1906|5|23
PLACE OF DEATH= Kristiania