HENRIK IBSEN

HENRIK IBSEN (1828-1906))

“A thousand words will not leave so

 Deep an impression as on deed”

                                                                                                                  Henrik Ibsen

§  Henrik Ibsen

§  His personal life

§  His specialty of writing

§  His style of writing

§  The synopsis of his work

            A Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen is considered as the father of Modern Theatre. He is also referred as the father of realism. After Shakespeare, he is considered as the second most influential and insightful dramatist and poet of the 19th century. Ibsen was born on 20th March 1828 in the city Skien, Norway. Henrik Ibsen was the eldest of his five siblings. He belonged to a merchant family.

Henrik father, Knud Ibsen (1797-1877) was a well-off merchant. His mother, Marichen Altenburg (1799-1869) was a daughter of one of the richest merchants of the Skien. When Henrik Ibsen turned eight his father went bankrupt and became alcohol addicted. This was the most shattering thing happened to his family. All through his childhood, Ibsen had been depressive that can easily be seen in his work which is as much a reflection of his own life. Even in most plays he had named his characters after his family.

            At the age of fifteen, he was forced to leave his school. Then he moved to Grimstad and worked as a pharmacist. That was the time when he discovered himself as an author. He worked at the pharmacy for six years and in the rarely given spare time he started writing plays and painting. Then in 1850 he moved to Christiania for the sake of getting admission into University of Christiania but couldn’t pass all the entrance exams. Quitting the idea of studies Ibsen fully concentrated on his writing. He completed and published his first verse drama, a tragedy, Catilina with the help of a friend. Nor the play did sell any significant number of copies neither it got accepted at any theatre for performances. In 1851, he got a job at the National Theatre of Bergen. The Burial Mound was his first drama to be staged and attracted few. In the following years he wrote numerous plays that went unsuccessful but his determination to be a playwright stayed strong.

             Henrik Ibsen is referred to by most critics as one of the best playwright of the modern times. His plays are also the second most performed right under Shakespeare.  Ibsen's plays were very controversial at the times because of his realism ideals that he incorporated into his plays.  Henrik Ibsen had multiple things that affected his style of writing from his father losing his job and becoming an alcoholic bitter old man or how Henrik Ibsen himself had a very poverty like life with his wife and kid.  Overall, the majority of his writings revolve around social problems.  Another very easily spotted style of Henrik Ibsen is his use of psychological problems in the majority of his characters.  Either they're making poor decisions in the story or they actually are psychologically different.  A good example of psychological problems is in the play Ghosts where Jakob Engsrand thinks it is a good idea to try to hire his adopted daughter to work in his brothel or "sailors establishment”.

 He has poverty as a main idea.  In A Doll's House Nora Helmer has to act and take out a loan under her father’s name to save her husband. "How painful and humiliating it would be for Torvald, with his manly independence, to know that he owed me anything! This quote is from Nora showing how what she did was something done out of poverty and if her husband knew she had to work to pay that off he would be mad.   Henrik Ibsen had a very tough life and went through a lot, which can clearly be shown in his writing.  Almost all of his writings have a similar style that he uses which reflects his own life almost perfectly.  Mainly, his styles include social problems like in A Doll's House, psychological problems like in Ghosts, and poverty problems such as the ones found in A Doll's House. But even with these controversial ideas for the time it is quite apparent why Ibsen is still to this day one of the best playwrights of all time. 

            Ibsen left Norway in 1862, eventually settling in Italy for a time. There he wrote Brand, a five-act tragedy about a clergyman whose feverish devotion to his faith costs him his family and ultimately his life in 1865. The play made him famous in Scandinavia. Two years later, Ibsen created one of his masterworks, Peer Gynt. In 1868, Ibsen moved to Germany. During his time there, he saw his social drama The Pillars of Society first performed in Munich. The play helped his career and was soon followed up by one of his most famous works, A Doll's House. A few years later, Ibsen moved back to Germany where he wrote one of his most famous works. With Hedda Gabler (1890), Ibsen created one of the theater's most notorious characters. Hedda, a general's daughter. The character has sometimes been called the female Hamlet, after Shakespeare's famous tragic figure. In 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway as a literary hero. When We Dead Awaken, written in 1899 was proved to be his final work

          On 23 May 1906, Ibsen died in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Christiania (now Oslo) after a series of strokes in March 1900.

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