Henrik Ibsen
1828–1906

Henrik Ibsen, born at Skien in south Norway on 20 March 1828, was a chemist’s assistant at Grimstad 1842–50. His first drama, Catilina (1850), was a failure; but after a short spell of study at Christiania, and nearly two years of journalism, he became director of Ole Bull’s theatre at Bergen, for which he wrote five romantic dramas.
In 1857 he became director of the National Theatre in Christiania. His next dramas were The Warriors in Helgeland (1858), The Rival Kings (1864) and Love’s Comedy (1862). The first two, reproducing the spirit of the old sagas, placed Ibsen in the foremost rank of Scandinavian dramatists; the last was a precursor of his satirical social dramas.
In 1862 the National Theatre went bankrupt; and Ibsen, enraged, because Norway held aloof from the Danes in their struggle against the Germans, forsook his country 1864–92, living in Rome, Dresden and Munich. The Norwegian parliament granted him a pension in 1866. In 1866–67 appeared the lyric dramas Brand and Peer Gynt; in 1873 the double drama Emperor and Galilean. There followed Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894) and John Gabriel Borkman (1896). These plays aroused a storm of controversy in England from 1889 as they had already done in Germany and Scandinavia. A passionate advocate of individual liberty, Ibsen strives to awaken men to a real comprehension of themselves; he is an un-compromising moral reformer, and dwells with painful insistence on the seamy side of human character and social institutions.
The interest and the method of his plays are almost exclusively psychological. His Correspondence was translated in 1905. He died on 23 May 1906.