Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was born into a wealthy, highly respected family. His father, Knud, was a merchant who met with success early on in life, but suffered a great financial loss when Henrik was seven. As a result, Knud became jaded and began to drink heavily. He took out his troubles on his children and his wife, Marichen Altenburg, who remained loving and self-sacrificing throughout this period of hardship. Ibsen would later model many of his characters after his mother and father. At the age of fifteen, Henrik was forced to discontinue his education after his father declared bankruptcy. He then moved to Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist, and also began writing plays. Ibsen resolved to seek a university education in Christiania (present-day Oslo), but did not pass the entrance exams. Fortunately, by this point Ibsen had persuaded himself that a university education would not help him succeed in writing great plays—he committed himself wholly to his art as a playwright from then on. He was, incidentally, remarkably unsuccessful in this vocation at first, and he and his wife Suzannah Thoresen were very poor. Their household survived on Ibsen’s meager income as a writer, director, and producer at the Det norske Theater in Bergen. As his threadbare years of artistic anonymity ground on, Ibsen became increasingly dissatisfied with life in Norway. As a result, in 1864 he left his wife and their five-year-old son, Sigurd (who grew up to become the Prime Minister of Norway), and moved south, first to Sorrento, Italy, and later to Dresden, Germany. He didn’t return to Norway until 1891. It was during this self-imposed exile that Ibsen came into his own as an artist. During this period he composed his visionary verse plays Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867), which won him fame and success. A little more than a decade later, he had pioneered and perfected the realist, bourgeois drama, as evidenced by the stream of masterpieces he published between 1879 and 1886, including A Doll’s House(1879), Ghosts (1881), and what some consider to be his masterpiece, The Wild Duck (1884). This period saw Ibsen ascend to his highest level of fame—he became a household name internationally, and was perhaps the most famous writer of his time. He was both celebrated for his perfectly crafted plots and deep character studies, and also denounced for his unflinching penetration into the sickness of modern life. After the most successful career in the theater since Shakespeare’s, Ibsen died in Oslo in 1906, the result of several strokes. He is often considered to be “the father of modern drama” and has served as an influence for artists ranging from Arthur Miller to James Joyce.