(This section on Ibsen’s life is indebted to the work of his biographer, Michael Meyer.)
Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 in Skien, a small town in Norway, 100 miles south of the capital. His father, Knud, a prosperous merchant, was one of the twenty richest men in town, and he provided for his family a life both happy and secure during the first seven years of Henrik's existence. By 1834, however, Knud Ibsen began to experience money problems, and by 1835 he was financially ruined. The family--mother, father, four children, and a fifth on the way--were forced to sell off their house in town and move to their much smaller summer residence.
By the age of 38 Ibsen's father was a failure, and he spent the remainder of his life an embittered and drunken man, continuously engaged in lawsuits with his neighbors, and increasingly alienated from his children. Ibsen's biographer, Michael Mayer, describes Knud Ibsen as a man who "could still be polite in company," while, "at home he felt no inhibitions to his passion for dominance, which at times bordered on brutality. Here he took his revenge for all the frustration which he encountered elsewhere, and made his wife and children pay for it."
In this contradiction between his father's public and private selves we may glimpse the germ of many of Ibsen's dramatic characters who, like Hedda Gabler, are torn between the need to keep up social appearances and the forbidden promptings of their personal demons. Certainly Ibsen resented his father's conduct for the rest of his life, and came ultimately to blame his whole family for his youthful unhappiness. Writing to a friend in 1867 he declared that "all my life I have turned my back on my parents . . . because I could not bear to continue a relationship based on imperfect understanding." This bitterness about family life also anticipates the mood of Hedda Gabler, in which the chief character, misunderstood by everyone in the play, is perhaps most completely a stranger to her own husband.
Ibsen left his unsympathetic home at the age of 15 to become an apothecary's apprentice in Grimstad, a town of 800 souls--less than half the population of his birthplace. It was in Grimstad, described by an early Ibsen biographer as a "small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing at all," that Ibsen was to come of age, living there for six years and beginning to develop his artistic and intellectual interests. Michael Mayer tells us that Ibsen "painted a great deal, drew caricatures of the local citizens, wrote lampoons about them, and serious poetry as well. He also read much. . . ."
While Ibsen was thus engaged in inventing himself, Europe as a whole was undergoing a period of profound transformation. Eighteen-forty-eight--the year of Ibsen's twentieth birthday--is acknowledged in western history as a revolutionary watershed, a moment of change comparable to 1789. Michael Mayer describes the impact on Ibsen of the tumultuous events of that time:
When . . . in February 1848 the people of Paris rose against their king . . . and France proclaimed herself a republic, the effect on the young Ibsen . . . was explosive. According to Edmond Gosse . . . this proclamation was 'the first political event that really interested him.' There was much more of the same kind to interest him in that tumultuous year. . . .
In addition to further republican uprisings in Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Parma, Prague, and Hungary, the year 1848 also produced what was perhaps the most revolutionary event of the century, the publication of Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto.
Ibsen's youth, then, was shaped by the upheavals of a period of far-reaching change in European society and politics. Under the influence of these events and ideas he was becoming "a young radical . . . with atheistic and republican views . . . a heretic in such matters as marriage, love, morality and religion." As he later wrote of his life at that time, "while a great age thundered outside I found myself in a state of war with the little community within which . . . I sat imprisoned." Indeed, it was to be Ibsen's destiny to dramatize the influence of the vast social disruptions of his age on the "little" world of personal life. His plays would explore the revolt of the "imprisoned" and "misunderstood" self against the authority of family and community.
In 1850, Ibsen left his apothecary's job and Grimstad for Christiania (as the Norwegian capital was then called), there to take his qualifying examinations for matriculation at the university. Unfortunately, his grades were too low to gain him admission, and he was left without any concrete plans for a career or livelihood. He had, however, begun writing plays and theater reviews, so that when a new national theater was established in the town of Bergen he was able to present enough professional credentials to get himself hired.
For the next dozen years, Ibsen worked as a dramatic author and director, first in Bergen, then in Christiania. He staged hundreds of plays, wrote several of his own, and in the process became a thoroughgoing theatrical professional. However, both artistic fulfillment and financial security eluded him until, as a result of his growing reputation in the theater, he was awarded a substantial grant by the Norwegian government to travel and study in Italy. He left Norway in 1864 bound for Rome, and did not return for twenty-seven years.
It was during his decades of self-imposed exile that Ibsen became a figure of international literary fame. Beginning with his study of social hypocrisy, The Pillars of Society (1877), he went on to write a series of plays that stunned and outraged Europe and that created modern drama as we still know it. Before Ibsen, the stages of Europe were dominated by romantic adventure, aristocratic intrigue, and melodramatic thrills; the settings, usually glamorous or exotic, were frequently historical, and the language often high-flown and poetic. Ibsen discarded all of that, and instead, by the late 1870s, he was concentrating entirely on stories about the problems of middle-class people, set in ordinary present-day locations, expressed in dialogue that sounded like every-day speech. The plays he wrote in this style are still central works in the modern repertory. They include A Doll's House (1879)—considered by many to be the seminal work of the modern theater--Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), and The Master Builder (1892). Hedda Gabler, written in 1890, is one of the most frequently performed and most widely admired of Ibsen's plays.
In these plays, Paul Johnson tells us, "Ibsen preached the revolt of the individual against the ancient regime of inhibitions and prejudices which held sway in every small town, indeed in every family. He taught men, and especially women, that their individual conscience and their personal notions of freedom have moral precedence over the requirements of society. In doing so he precipitated a revolution in attitudes and behavior which . . . has been proceeding . . . ever since."
Ibsen wrote his last play, When We Dead Awaken, in 1899. In 1900 he suffered the first of a series of crippling strokes. He died in 1906.
Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 in Skien, a small town in Norway, 100 miles south of the capital. His father, Knud, a prosperous merchant, was one of the twenty richest men in town, and he provided for his family a life both happy and secure during the first seven years of Henrik's existence. By 1834, however, Knud Ibsen began to experience money problems, and by 1835 he was financially ruined. The family--mother, father, four children, and a fifth on the way--were forced to sell off their house in town and move to their much smaller summer residence.
By the age of 38 Ibsen's father was a failure, and he spent the remainder of his life an embittered and drunken man, continuously engaged in lawsuits with his neighbors, and increasingly alienated from his children. Ibsen's biographer, Michael Mayer, describes Knud Ibsen as a man who "could still be polite in company," while, "at home he felt no inhibitions to his passion for dominance, which at times bordered on brutality. Here he took his revenge for all the frustration which he encountered elsewhere, and made his wife and children pay for it."
In this contradiction between his father's public and private selves we may glimpse the germ of many of Ibsen's dramatic characters who, like Hedda Gabler, are torn between the need to keep up social appearances and the forbidden promptings of their personal demons. Certainly Ibsen resented his father's conduct for the rest of his life, and came ultimately to blame his whole family for his youthful unhappiness. Writing to a friend in 1867 he declared that "all my life I have turned my back on my parents . . . because I could not bear to continue a relationship based on imperfect understanding." This bitterness about family life also anticipates the mood of Hedda Gabler, in which the chief character, misunderstood by everyone in the play, is perhaps most completely a stranger to her own husband.
Ibsen left his unsympathetic home at the age of 15 to become an apothecary's apprentice in Grimstad, a town of 800 souls--less than half the population of his birthplace. It was in Grimstad, described by an early Ibsen biographer as a "small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing at all," that Ibsen was to come of age, living there for six years and beginning to develop his artistic and intellectual interests. Michael Mayer tells us that Ibsen "painted a great deal, drew caricatures of the local citizens, wrote lampoons about them, and serious poetry as well. He also read much. . . ."
While Ibsen was thus engaged in inventing himself, Europe as a whole was undergoing a period of profound transformation. Eighteen-forty-eight--the year of Ibsen's twentieth birthday--is acknowledged in western history as a revolutionary watershed, a moment of change comparable to 1789. Michael Mayer describes the impact on Ibsen of the tumultuous events of that time:
When . . . in February 1848 the people of Paris rose against their king . . . and France proclaimed herself a republic, the effect on the young Ibsen . . . was explosive. According to Edmond Gosse . . . this proclamation was 'the first political event that really interested him.' There was much more of the same kind to interest him in that tumultuous year. . . .
In addition to further republican uprisings in Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Parma, Prague, and Hungary, the year 1848 also produced what was perhaps the most revolutionary event of the century, the publication of Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto.
Ibsen's youth, then, was shaped by the upheavals of a period of far-reaching change in European society and politics. Under the influence of these events and ideas he was becoming "a young radical . . . with atheistic and republican views . . . a heretic in such matters as marriage, love, morality and religion." As he later wrote of his life at that time, "while a great age thundered outside I found myself in a state of war with the little community within which . . . I sat imprisoned." Indeed, it was to be Ibsen's destiny to dramatize the influence of the vast social disruptions of his age on the "little" world of personal life. His plays would explore the revolt of the "imprisoned" and "misunderstood" self against the authority of family and community.
In 1850, Ibsen left his apothecary's job and Grimstad for Christiania (as the Norwegian capital was then called), there to take his qualifying examinations for matriculation at the university. Unfortunately, his grades were too low to gain him admission, and he was left without any concrete plans for a career or livelihood. He had, however, begun writing plays and theater reviews, so that when a new national theater was established in the town of Bergen he was able to present enough professional credentials to get himself hired.
For the next dozen years, Ibsen worked as a dramatic author and director, first in Bergen, then in Christiania. He staged hundreds of plays, wrote several of his own, and in the process became a thoroughgoing theatrical professional. However, both artistic fulfillment and financial security eluded him until, as a result of his growing reputation in the theater, he was awarded a substantial grant by the Norwegian government to travel and study in Italy. He left Norway in 1864 bound for Rome, and did not return for twenty-seven years.
It was during his decades of self-imposed exile that Ibsen became a figure of international literary fame. Beginning with his study of social hypocrisy, The Pillars of Society (1877), he went on to write a series of plays that stunned and outraged Europe and that created modern drama as we still know it. Before Ibsen, the stages of Europe were dominated by romantic adventure, aristocratic intrigue, and melodramatic thrills; the settings, usually glamorous or exotic, were frequently historical, and the language often high-flown and poetic. Ibsen discarded all of that, and instead, by the late 1870s, he was concentrating entirely on stories about the problems of middle-class people, set in ordinary present-day locations, expressed in dialogue that sounded like every-day speech. The plays he wrote in this style are still central works in the modern repertory. They include A Doll's House (1879)—considered by many to be the seminal work of the modern theater--Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), and The Master Builder (1892). Hedda Gabler, written in 1890, is one of the most frequently performed and most widely admired of Ibsen's plays.
In these plays, Paul Johnson tells us, "Ibsen preached the revolt of the individual against the ancient regime of inhibitions and prejudices which held sway in every small town, indeed in every family. He taught men, and especially women, that their individual conscience and their personal notions of freedom have moral precedence over the requirements of society. In doing so he precipitated a revolution in attitudes and behavior which . . . has been proceeding . . . ever since."
Ibsen wrote his last play, When We Dead Awaken, in 1899. In 1900 he suffered the first of a series of crippling strokes. He died in 1906.