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Henrik Ibsen

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Theatre; Writers and
critics

   Photo of Henrik Ibsen in his older days
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   Photo of Henrik Ibsen in his older days

   Henrik Johan Ibsen ( March 20, 1828 – May 23, 1906) was a major
   Norwegian playwright who was largely responsible for the rise of the
   modern realistic drama. It is said that Ibsen is the most frequently
   performed classical dramatist in the world after Shakespeare.

   Despite spending much time in Germany and Italy, 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 façades, 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, like the Paus family - Ibsen later points out his distinguished
   ancestors and relatives in a letter to Georg Brandes. Shortly after his
   birth, however, his family's fortunes took a significant turn for the
   worse. His mother turned to religion for solace, while his father
   declined into a 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.

   At fifteen, Ibsen left home. He moved to the small town 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 came to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to attend
   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 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 see production,
   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 Theatre 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 Theatre, 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 Theatre. He married Suzannah Thoresen the
   same year and they 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. With success, Ibsen became more confident and began
   to introduce more and more 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 centre of dramatic
   controversy across Europe.
   Portrait from around 1870
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   Portrait from around 1870

   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 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 has 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 liberalism of the time. He
   showed it to be just as self-serving as Conservatism. 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. The play has 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 as 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.
   Letter from Ibsen to Edmund Gosse in 1899
   Enlarge
   Letter from Ibsen to Edmund Gosse in 1899

   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 centre 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 theatre
   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 theatre, but across public life. Ibsen died
   in Christiania 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.

List of works

     * (1850) Catiline (Catilina)
     * (1850) The Burial Mound (Kjæmpehøjen)
     * (1852) St. John's Eve (play) (Sancthansnatten)
     * (1854) Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad)
     * (1855) The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug)
     * (1856) Olaf Liljekrans (Olaf Liljekrans)
     * (1857) The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland)
     * (1862) Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie)
     * (1863) The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne)
     * (1865) Brand (Brand)
     * (1867) Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt)
     * (1869) The League of Youth (De unges Forbund)
     * (1873) Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer)
     * (1877) Pillars of Society (Samfundets støtter)
     * (1879) A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem)
     * (1881) Ghosts (Gengangere)
     * (1882) An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende)
     * (1884) The Wild Duck (Vildanden)
     * (1886) Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm)
     * (1888) The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra havet)
     * (1890) Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler)
     * (1892) The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness)
     * (1894) Little Eyolf (Lille Eyolf)
     * (1896) John Gabriel Borkman (John Gabriel Borkman)
     * (1899) When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vågner)

Poetry

     * Digte - only released collection of poetry, included Terje Vigen.

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