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Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 – May 23, 1906) was a major Norwegian
playwright largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama. He is often
referred to as the "father of modern drama." Ibsen is held to be the greatest of
Norwegian authors and one of the most important playwrights of all time, celebrated
as a national symbol by Norwegians.
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 largely founded the modern stage by introducing 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 private secrets hidden from society. It is not surprising that there is
only one known photograph of Ibsen in which he is smiling.
At fifteen, Ibsen left home. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an
apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, he fathered an illegitimate
child with a servant maid whom he rejected. Ibsen went to Christiania (later
renamed Oslo) intending to attend 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 Brynjulf 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 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 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.
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.
Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868. Here he spent years writing the
play he himself 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 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 counterblast 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. American playwright Arthur Miller wrote
his own adaptation of the play to correspond to the political climate in the United
States under Trumanism. It has also been made into a popular Bengali film titled
Ganashatru, literally meaning "the enemy of the people", by Oscar-winning Indian
film maker Satyajit Ray. American actor Steve McQueen also filmed the play in 1978
with himself in the lead role.
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. Ibsen died in Kristiania
on May 23, 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. 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. 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.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Henrik
Ibsen - Generator - Biography
