Biography: Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828-1906) was a Norwegian playwright, theatre director and one of the most influential playwrights of the modern age.

The scion of an impoverished family from an outof-the-way corner of a peripheral country devoid of strong cultural institutions, Ibsen rose to become one of the prime generative forces of modern drama. His father, a prosperous merchant in the small Norwegian port town of Skien, descended into bitterness and alcoholism after his business collapsed in 1834 and his eldest son Henrik’s formal education ceased at age 15 when he was sent to become a pharmacist’s assistant. Miserable and lonely, he became a voracious reader and a keen observer of people. He also, at age 18, impregnated a servant in the shop, 10 years older, and was forced to pay child support for the next 16 years for a son he probably never met.

The young Ibsen had strong radical sympathies. He wrote his first play Catiline flush with enthusiasm for revolutionary romanticism after the 1848 European uprisings. After failing his university entrance exams, he took a job at a theater in Bergen, which broadened his horizons by sending him on foreign theatergoing trips. Over the next decade he acquired extensive practical theater experience—writing, producing and directing many different types of plays. In 1858 he married Suzannah Thoresen who gave birth in 1859 to their only child, Sigurd (later a prominent Norwegian politician). The family’s finances were precarious, and Ibsen was threatened with debtor’s prison. With help from friends and a small government grant, he left Norway in 1864 and lived abroad for the next 27 years.

All the plays that established Ibsen’s career were written in exile. He lived aloof from all but the most intimate friends and family in Rome, Dresden and Munich. His epic verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867)—both dazzlingly imaginative blends of folklore and psychological observation—won recognition and respect throughout Scandinavia. It was his series of prose dramas written between 1877 and 1899, however, set in middle-class Norwegian homes—including Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, and Rosmersholm—that made him a household name in Europe, receiving prominent productions and sparking passionate debates. A Doll’s House (1879) catapulted him to notoriety, selling out multiple editions, provoking censorship, and becoming a cause célèbre for women’s rights advocates. The revolution in drama that it helped spark reached beyond specific social issues, however, as Ibsen had given the world a new model for a bourgeois drama freed from all its old obligations to idealism.

Henrik Ibsen in Munich, circa 1878, courtesy of the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History.