Henrik Ibsen

• 1. Introduction

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  Henrik Ibsen lay in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania, recovering from a series of strokes that had begun in March 1900. On the 22nd of May 1906, his nurse told a visitor he seemed a little better. Ibsen spluttered two words in reply: "On the contrary." He died the following day at 2:30 in the afternoon. These were the last words of a Norwegian playwright born on the 20th of March 1828, a man often called the father of modern drama. He pioneered theatrical realism, yet also wrote lyrical epic works. By 2014 he was the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. How did a merchant's son from a small port town come to write plays that caused uproar across Europe and even across the Atlantic? Why did a man celebrated as a champion of women's rights insist the state must be abolished? And what did his own family, with its tightly intertwined branches, smuggle into the dark secrets of his stage? Sigmund Freud placed him beside Sophocles. George Bernard Shaw argued he had surpassed Shakespeare. To understand that claim, we have to begin not with triumph, but with a town.

• 2. The Patrician Town

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  Skien, in the county of Bratsberg in Telemark, had for centuries been one of Norway's most important and internationally oriented cities. It was a centre of seafaring, timber exports, and early industrialization. That commercial strength had helped make Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark-Norway. Ibsen was born into this world on the 20th of March 1828, the son of the merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen, who lived from 1797 to 1877, and Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg, who lived from 1799 to 1869. He was baptised at home in the Lutheran state church, membership of which was mandatory, on the 28th of March, with the baptism confirmed on the 19th of June. The scholar Jørgen Haave writes that Ibsen had strong family ties to the families who had held power and wealth in Telemark since the mid-1500s. Ibsen himself put it plainly: his parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien. He claimed kinship with just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place. Haave argues this elite distanced itself strongly from the common farmer population and considered itself part of an educated European culture. Ibsen scholar Ellen Rees calls the family the closest thing Norway had to an aristocracy, albeit one that lost most of its power during his lifetime.

• 3. A Family Woven Tight

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  Knud and Marichen grew up as close relatives, sometimes called "near-siblings," both belonging to the Paus family of Rising and Altenburg House. That extended family centered on the sibling pair Ole Paus, who lived from 1766 to 1855, and Hedevig Paus, who lived from 1763 to 1848. The knot was tied early. After Knud's father Henrich Johan Ibsen died at sea in 1797 when Knud was a newborn, his mother Johanne Plesner married captain Ole Paus the following year. On the 1st of December 1825, Knud married his stepfather's niece Marichen. Older Ibsen scholars claimed the playwright was fascinated by his parents' strange, almost incestuous marriage, and that he would treat incestuous relationships in several plays, notably Rosmersholm. Haave counters that such a close relationship was not unusual among the Skien elite. The Paus temperament ran through the family too. Hedvig Ibsen remarked, "we belong to a silent family," playfully echoing the likeness between "taus," meaning silent, and "Paus." Johan Kielland Bergwitz claimed it was with the Paus family that Henrik Ibsen had the most pronounced temperament traits in common. That introverted streak would reappear in his own son, Sigurd.

• 4. The Myth Of The Fall

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  Henrik Jæger's seminal biography helped fix a story that scholars now reject. It cast Ibsen as a self-made genius, descending from privilege into hardship before artistic triumph. The depiction painted his father as a failed merchant and tyrannical figure who fell into alcoholism, the family sliding into social decline. Ellen Rees notes that 21st-century research into Ibsen's life has been marked by a revolution that debunked numerous tales once taken for granted. Jon Nygaard's book on Ibsen's social milieu and Jørgen Haave's The Ibsen Family refuted such claims. Haave shows that Knud Ibsen's economic problems in the 1830s were mainly the result of difficult times shared with most of the bourgeoisie. When Henrik was around seven, the family was forced to sell Altenburggården in 1835, moving the following year to their summer home and farm at Venstøp. Even there they kept four servants and socialised with the Skien elite. The disintegration of Henrik's immediate family came in the 1850s, after he had left home and was establishing himself in the theatre. Meanwhile his uncles, Henrik Johan Paus, Christian Cornelius Paus, and Christopher Blom Paus, stayed firmly established as lawyers, officials, and wealthy shipowners. Nygaard summarized the whole shift bluntly: all the popular notions about Ibsen were wrong.

• 5. Apprentice And Exile

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  At fifteen, Ibsen left school and moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist. There he began writing plays. In 1846, at eighteen, he had a liaison with Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen that produced a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkdalen. Ibsen paid for the boy's upbringing until he was fourteen but never saw the child. His first play, the tragedy Catilina, appeared in 1850 under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme when he was only twenty-two, and it was never performed. Ibsen spent years at Det norske Theater in Bergen, involved in the production of more than 145 plays as writer, director, and producer. He married Suzannah Thoresen on the 18th of June 1858, and she gave birth to their only child, Sigurd, on the 23rd of December 1859. Disenchanted with Norway, Ibsen left Christiania in 1864 for Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He spent the next 27 years in Italy and Germany, primarily in Rome, Dresden, and Munich, visiting Norway only a few times. Brand, in 1865, brought the critical acclaim he sought. Peer Gynt followed in 1867, with incidental music and songs composed by Edvard Grieg. After Peer Gynt, Ibsen abandoned verse and turned to realistic prose.

• 6. The Drama Of Ideas

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  Emperor and Galilean, published in 1873, was the play Ibsen always regarded as his masterpiece, dramatizing the life of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. He wrote it during years in Dresden, where he had moved from Italy in 1868. Very few shared his estimate of it. After moving to Munich in 1875, Ibsen began his first contemporary realist drama, The Pillars of Society, first published and performed in 1877. A Doll's House came in 1879, a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women, and it was its reception that brought him international acclaim. Ghosts, in 1881, went further, following a widow whose husband's vices, including syphilis, are passed to their son. The mere mention of venereal disease was scandalous. An Enemy of the People, in 1882, was written as a response to those who had rejected Ghosts. Its protagonist, a physician, discovers a town's public bath is contaminated by the local tannery, and for telling the truth he is declared an enemy of the people, with stones thrown through his windows. Ibsen called himself a lone franc tireur in the outposts, playing a lone hand. He claimed to be ignorant of books, yet Georg Brandes said he seemed to stand in some mysterious correspondence with the fermenting, germinating ideas of the day.

• 7. Secrets Behind The Façade

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  The Wild Duck, in 1884, is by many considered Ibsen's finest work and one of his most complex, alongside Rosmersholm. While working on it, Ibsen received his only visit from a relative during his decades in exile, when the 21-year-old Count Christopher Paus made an extended stay with him in Rome. Jørgen Haave notes Ibsen had not been this close to his own family since leaving his hometown over 30 years before, and shortly after the visit he declared he had overcome a writer's block. The play tells of Gregers Werle, whom Jon Nygaard describes as representing the spirit of the Paus family, a young man who returns from exile and reunites with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Gregers pursues what is called the Summons of the Ideal, exposing the secrets behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home. Among them: the elder Werle impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Late in his career Ibsen turned inward. In Hedda Gabler, in 1890, and The Master Builder, in 1892, he explored psychological conflicts beyond a simple rejection of convention. The title role of Hedda is still regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress today.

• 8. Uproar And Canon

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  When A Doll's House was published, it became the centre of every conversation at every social gathering in Christiania. One hostess wrote on her party invitations, "You are politely requested not to mention Mr Ibsen's new play." His plays initially reached a wider audience as read plays than in performance. It was 20 years before the authorities allowed Ghosts to be performed in Norway. The older picture of Ibsen as an embattled avant-gardist, misunderstood by a hostile public, is rejected by scholars Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem. They note that by the late 1870s Ibsen had already left the professors behind in income, closer to a member of the cabinet than a struggling author. By the end of the 1880s even conservatives celebrated him, and the liberal newspapers now confidently considered Ibsen their own. Politically he kept his distance from both wings of the new Left, writing that his people were still not even near ready for the ideas of freedom. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904. His reach extended to Japan, where Hogetsu Shimamura declared an Age of Ibsen, and scholars hold that Ibsen marked the birth of modern drama there. He was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund in central Oslo. A century after his death, in 2006, the Norwegian government organised the Ibsen Year, and the Ibsen Museum reopened the house where he had spent his last eleven years, restored to its original colours and decor.