Henrik Ibsen - Modernism Lab Essays Henrik Ibsen by Pericles Lewis The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828- 1906 ) created modern realistic drama out of elements of the popular nineteenth-century forms of the melodrama and the "well-made play." Although his first European successes occurred with his romantic verse dramas of the 1860s, Ibsen’s great influence on the English stage began with A Doll’s House . The play’s emphasis on the social problem of women’s status in marriage gave Ibsen a reputation, especially in England, as a playwright of ideas and a feminist. Near the end of his life, however, Ibsen said that he had “been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than people have generally been inclined to believe.” [1] In fact, Ibsen’s career is marked by a tension between the poet and the social philosopher. At the beginning of his career, Ibsen, who was a patriot and partisan of the 1848 revolutions, wrote verse dramas on themes from Norwegian history. He also gained much experience as stage manager, in-house playwright, and artistic director of two Norwegian theaters.

Ibsen left Norway for Rome in 1864, at the age of 36; there, he wrote Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), which made him famous throughout Europe. Both plays are in verse and follow in the tradition of European romantic drama, typified by Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832). Brand concerns a pastor who preaches duty over love and whose wife and son die because of his hard-heartedness; the play ends with Pastor Brand killed in an avalanche, as a booming voice off-stage cries out “God is Love” (a Biblical quotation, from 1 John 4:8). Peer Gynt draws on Scandinavian myths and folk tales; the protagonist, Peer, wanders around the world, indulges his whims, seduces women, consorts with the Troll King, and hopes to become Emperor of the World. From the Troll King, he learns the motto “To thy own self be—enough.” Both plays turn on the conflicts between duty and pleasure, or duty and love, or duty to others and duty to oneself, which would also underlie Ibsen’s later plays.

These major poetic dramas, filled with larger-than-life characters, mythical elements, and supernatural intervention, inspired later symbolist and avant-garde playwrights, but Ibsen himself turned quite suddenly to writing essentially realist prose dramas about modern life, of which A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881) were the first major successes. They coincided with the height of the naturalist movement, and shared some of the qualities advocated by Emile Zola and August Strindberg, although Ibsen did not share the naturalists’ scientific worldview. His turn to prose coincided with his departure from Italy for Germany, where he lived for twenty years. Elements of melodrama and the well-made play remain even as late as Hedda Gabler (1890), the last of Ibsen’s realist plays, published at the height of his fame and performed all across Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891. His next play, The Master Builder (1892), initiated Ibsen’s turn from psychological realism to a renewed exploration of symbolism and the unconscious mind.

Ibsen’s mysticism displayed itself still more openly in his final work, When We Dead Awaken (1899. His late works inspired the new interest in dreams, ghosts, and symbols that shaped avant-garde theater in the twentieth century, from Strindberg to the expressionists and absurdists. Thus, while best known in England for his realist works, Ibsen also served as an inspiration to the anti-naturalist modern theater of Europe, through his early romantic and late symbolist plays. The realism of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler is only one aspect of his accomplishment, one that shows modern theater as the attempt to represent the tragedy of modern life. [2] ↑ Quoted in Richard Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), p. 49. ↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp.180-181, 183.

The Master Builder : Henrik Ibsen : 9781481110976 The Master Builder Add to basket Add to wishlist Description Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder.-wikipedia show more Product details 152.4 x 228.6 x 11.94mm | 376.48g Publication date The Master Builder : Henrik Ibsen : 9780571330812 The Master Builder By (author) Henrik Ibsen , By (author) David Hare Share US$8.47 US$12.05 You save US$3.58 Free delivery worldwide Add to basket Add to wishlist Description The change will come.

And it's not far away, I promise you that. Some figure will emerge from the dark screaming 'Get out of the way'. And not far behind others will follow...The young are waiting. In all their power. Knocking on the door. The master builder Halvard Solness has a fear of falling. A self-made man, without professional qualifications, he has achieved domination in the town but he's increasingly frightened of being displaced by the young. A woman, Hilde Wangel, appears from the mountains, claiming to have known Solness ten years previously, and telling him of a promise he made to her when she thirteen. David Hare has written a new adaptation of one of Henrik Ibsen's most complex autobiographical masterpieces - a mesmeric exploration of control, power, lust and death, which builds to a vertiginous climax. The Master Builder premiered in this English version at The Old Vic, London, in January 2016.

show more Product details 125 x 198 x 10mm | 142g Publication date Plays, Playscripts About Henrik Ibsen Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian poet and playwright, was one of the shapers of modern theatre, who tempered naturalism with an understanding of social responsibility and individual psychology. His earliest major plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were large-scale verse dramas, but with Pillars of the Community (1877) he began to explore contemporary issues. There followed A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882). A richer understanding of the complexity of human impulses marks such later works as The Wild Duck (1885), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), while the imminence of mortality overshadows his last great plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).

David Hare is a playwright and filmmaker. His stage plays include Plenty, Pravda (with Howard Brenton) Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy's View, Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens, South Downs, The Absence of War and The Judas Kiss. His films for cinema and television include Wetherby, The Hours, Damage, The Reader and the Worricker trilogy: Page Eight, Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield. He has written English adaptations of plays by Pirandello, Chekhov, Brecht, Schnitzler, Lorca, Gorky and Ibsen. For fifteen years he was an Associate Director of the National Theatre. show more Follow us Henrik Ibsen | Norwegian Ibsen Company – Kåre Conradi Press Henrik Ibsen Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈhɛnɾɪk ˈɪpsən]; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as “the father of prose drama” and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre.

His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Several of his plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was required to model strict mores of family life and propriety. Ibsen’s work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements. Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as “a profound poetic dramatist—the best since Shakespeare“. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Eugene O’Neill. Many critics consider him the greatest playwright since Shakespeare. Ibsen wrote his plays in Dano-Norwegian (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal.

Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. Family and Youth Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen (1797–1877) and Marichen Altenburg (1799–1869), a well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien in Telemark county, a city which was noted for shipping timber. As he wrote in an 1882 letter to critic and scholar Georg Brandes, “my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien”, explaining that he was closely related with “just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings”, mentioning the families Paus, Plesner, von der Lippe, Cappelen and Blom.

Ibsen’s grandfather, ship’s captain Henrich Ibsen (1765–1797), had died at sea in 1797, and Knud Ibsen was raised on the estate of ship-owner Ole Paus (1776–1855), after his mother Johanne, née Plesner (1770–1847), remarried. Knud Ibsen’s half brothers included lawyer and politician Christian Cornelius Paus, banker and ship-owner Christopher Blom Paus, and lawyer Henrik Johan Paus, who grew up with Ibsen’s mother in the Altenburg home and after whom Henrik (Johan) Ibsen was named. Knud Ibsen’s paternal ancestors were ship’s captains of Danish origin, but he decided to become a merchant, having initial success. His marriage to Marichen Altenburg, a daughter of ship-owner Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763–1824) and Hedevig Christine Paus (1763–1848), was “an excellent family arrangement.

Marichen’s mother and Knud’s step-father were sister and brother, and the bride and groom, who had grown up together, were practically regarded as sister and brother themselves. Marichen Altenburg was a fine catch, the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the prosperous lumber town of Skien.” Theodore Jorgenson points out that “Henrik’s ancestry [thus] reached back into the important Telemark family of Paus both on the father’s and on the mother’s side. Hedvig Paus must have been well known to the young dramatist, for she lived until 1848.” Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents’ “strange, almost incestuous marriage,” and would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably his masterpiece Rosmersholm. When Henrik Ibsen was around seven years old, however, his father’s fortunes took a significant turn for the worse, and the family was eventually forced to sell the major Altenburg building in central Skien and move permanently to their small summer house, Venstøp, outside of the city.

His bankruptcy made Knud Ibsen a moody and embittered man who turned to alcoholism, who visited “his bitterness and resentment on his wife and children.” Henrik’s sister Hedvig would write about their mother: “She was a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the house, everything to her husband and children. She sacrificed herself time and again. There was no bitterness or reproach in her.” Marichen Altenburg was “small, brunette, and dark-complexioned, and the only existing likeness of her, a silhoutte, bears out the tradition that she was beautiful”. The Ibsen family eventually moved to a city house, Snipetorp, owned by Knud Ibsen’s half-brother, wealthy banker and ship-owner Christopher Blom Paus. His father’s financial ruin would have a strong influence on Ibsen’s later work; 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 secrets hidden from society. Ibsen would both model and name characters in his plays after his own family.

A central theme in Ibsen’s plays is the “unremitting portrayals of suffering women,” echoing his mother Marichen Altenburg; “Ibsen’s sympathy with women came from his understanding of their powerlessness, and his education began at home.” At fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was age 18, a liaison with a servant produced an illegitimate child, whose upbringing Ibsen had to pay for until the boy was in his teens, though Ibsen never saw the boy. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catiline (1850), was published under the pseudonym ”Brynjolf Bjarme”, when he was only 20, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention.

Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful. Ibsen’s main inspiration in the early period, right up to Peer Gynt, was apparently Norwegian author Henrik Wergeland and the Norwegian folk tales as collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In Ibsen’s youth, Wergeland was the most acclaimed, and by far the most read, Norwegian poet and playwright. Life and writings He spent the next several years employed at Detnorske Theater (Bergen), where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period, he published five new, though largely unremarkable, plays. Despite Ibsen’s failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing. Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of the Christiania Theatre.

He married Suzannah Thoresen on 18 June 1858 and she gave birth to their only child Sigurd on 23 December 1859. 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 Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He didn’t return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was as a noted, but controversial, playwright. His next play, Brand (1865), brought him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as did the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter’s influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling.

Ibsen’s next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard. With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of 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 center of dramatic controversy across Europe. Ibsen photographed in Dresden ca. 1870 Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he 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 marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen’s society.

Ghosts followed in 1881, another scathing commentary on the morality of Ibsen’s society, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But his philandering continued right up until his death, and his vices are passed on to their son in the form of syphilis. The mention of venereal disease alone was scandalous, but to show how it could poison a respectable family was considered intolerable. 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. Contemporary society’s 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 conservatism of society, but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response 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 physician in a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water is contaminated by the 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. As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against society’s mores, but against overeager reformers and their idealism.

Always an iconoclast, Ibsen was equally willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own. The Wild Duck (1884) is by many considered 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. Furthermore, 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. Late in his career, Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society’s moral values. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions.

Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic or hackneyed, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. 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. Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them, and while Hedda has a few similarities with the character of Nora in A Doll’s House, many of today’s audiences and theater 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 theater 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. He had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates him in his early autobiographical novel “Stephen Hero”.

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 theater, but across public life. Death Ibsen, late in his career. 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. When, on 22 May, his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen spluttered his last words “On the contrary” (“Tvertimod!”). He died the following day at 2:30 P.M. Ibsen was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund (“The Graveyard of Our Savior”) in central Oslo. Centenary The 100th anniversary of Ibsen’s death in 2006 was commemorated with an “Ibsen year” in Norway and other countries.

This year the homebuilding company Selvaag also opened Peer Gynt Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway, in Henrik Ibsen’s honour, making it possible to follow the dramatic play Peer Gynt scene by scene. On 23 May 2006, The Ibsen Museum (Oslo) reopened to the public the house where Ibsen had spent his last eleven years, completely restored with the original interior, colors, and decor. Descendants From his marriage with Suzannah Thoresen, Ibsen had one son, lawyer and government minister Sigurd Ibsen. Sigurd Ibsen married Bergljot Bjørnson, the daughter of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Their children were: son Tancred Ibsen, who became a film director and who was married to Lillebil Ibsen, and daughters Irene Ibsen Bille and Eleonora Ibsen Borberg. Tancred Ibsen only had one child, diplomat Tancred Ibsen, Jr. Sigurd Ibsen’s daughter, playwright Irene Ibsen, married Josias Bille, a member of the Danish ancient noble Bille family.

Sigurd Ibsen’s daughter, Eleonora Ibsen, married playwright and critic Svend Borberg. Irene had three children: Suzanna Bering Jensen, Anders Bille and Danish actor Joen Bille. Eleonora had three children: Bergliot Nørgaard, Doctor Steen Borberg and Publisher Henrik Borberg. Monogram of Henrik Ibsen We gratefully acknowledge Wikipedia for the article Henrik Ibsen. © Copyright Norwegian Ibsen Company 2017. Henrik Ibsen | Norwegian dramatist and poet | Britannica.com Norwegian dramatist and poet Alternative Title: Henrik Johan Ibsen Henrik Ibsen Arne Evensen Garborg Henrik Ibsen, in full Henrik Johan Ibsen (born March 20, 1828, Skien , Norway —died May 23, 1906, Kristiania [formerly Christiania; now Oslo]), major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action, penetrating dialogue , and rigorous thought.

Ibsen was born at Skien, a small lumbering town of southern Norway. His father was a respected general merchant in the community until 1836, when he suffered the permanent disgrace of going bankrupt. As a result, he sank into a querulous penury, which his wife’s withdrawn and sombre religiosity did nothing to mitigate . There was no redeeming the family misfortunes; as soon as he could, aged just 15, Henrik moved to Grimstad, a hamlet of some 800 persons 70 miles (110 km) down the coast. There he supported himself meagerly as an apothecary’s apprentice while studying nights for admission to the university. And during this period he used his few leisure moments to write a play . This work, Catilina (1850; Catiline), grew out of the Latin texts Ibsen had to study for his university examinations. Though not a very good play, it showed a natural bent for the theatre and embodied themes—the rebellious hero, his destructive mistress—that would preoccupy Ibsen as long as he lived.

In 1850 he went to Christiania (known since 1925 by its older name of Oslo), studied for entrance examinations there, and settled into the student quarter—though not, however, into classes. For the theatre was in his blood, and at the age of only 23 he got himself appointed director and playwright to a new theatre at Bergen , in which capacity he had to write a new play every year. This was a wonderful opportunity for a young man eager to work in drama, but it brought Ibsen up against a range of fearsome problems he was ill-equipped to handle. In the medieval Icelandic sagas Norway possessed a heroic, austere literature of unique magnificence; but the stage on which these materials had to be set was then dominated by the drawing-room drama of the French playwright Eugène Scribe and by the actors, acting traditions, and language of Denmark . Out of these materials young Ibsen was asked to create a “national drama.” First at Bergen and then at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania from 1857 to 1862, Ibsen tried to make palatable dramatic fare out of incongruous ingredients.

In addition to writing plays which were uncongenial to him and unacceptable to audiences, he did a lot of directing. He was too inhibited to make a forceful director, but too intelligent not to pick up a great deal of practical stage wisdom from his experience. After he moved to Christiania and after his marriage to Suzannah Thoresen in 1858, he began to develop qualities of independence and authority that had been hidden before. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent Two of the last plays that Ibsen wrote for the Norwegian stage showed signs of new spiritual energy. Kjaerlighedens komedie (1862; Love’s Comedy), a satire on romantic illusions , was violently unpopular, but it expressed an authentic theme of anti-idealism that Ibsen would soon make his own; and in Kongsemnerne (1863; The Pretenders) he dramatized the mysterious inner authority that makes a man a man, a king, or a great playwright. This one play was in fact the national drama after which Ibsen had been groping so long, and before long it would be recognized as such.

But it came too late; though the play was good, the theatre in Christiania was bankrupt, and Ibsen’s career as a stage writer was apparently at an end. A Study of Poetry But the death of his theatre was the liberation of Ibsen as a playwright. Without regard for a public he thought petty and illiberal, without care for traditions he found hollow and pretentious, he could now write for himself. He decided to go abroad, and applied for a small state grant. He was awarded part of it, and in April 1864 he left Norway for Italy . For the next 27 years he lived abroad, mainly in Rome, Dresden , and Munich , returning to Norway only for short visits in 1874 and 1885. For reasons that he sometimes summarized as “small-mindedness,” his homeland had left a very bitter taste in his mouth. With him into exile Ibsen brought the fragments of a long semi-dramatic poem to be named Brand . Its central figure is a dynamic rural pastor who takes his religious calling with a blazing sincerity that transcends not only all forms of compromise but all traces of human sympathy and warmth as well.

“All or nothing” is the demand that his god makes of Brand and that Brand in turn makes of others. He is a moral hero, but he is also a moral monster, and his heart is torn by the anguish that his moral program demands he inflict on his family. He never hesitates, never ceases to tower over the petty compromisers and spiritual sluggards surrounding him. Yet in the last scene where Brand stands alone before his god, a voice thunders from an avalanche that, even as it crushes the pastor physically, repudiates his whole moral life as well: “He is the god of love,” says the voice from on high. So the play is not only a denunciation of small-mindedness but a tragedy of the spirit that would transcend it. The poem faced its readers not just with a choice but with an impasse; the heroic alternative was also a destructive (and self-destructive) alternative. In Norway Brand was a tremendous popular success, even though (and in part because) its central meaning was so troubling.

Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Hard on the heels of Brand (1866) came Peer Gynt (1867), another drama in rhymed couplets presenting an utterly antithetical view of human nature. If Brand is a moral monolith, Peer Gynt is a capering will-o’-the-wisp, a buoyant and self-centred opportunist who is aimless, yielding, and wholly unprincipled, yet who remains a lovable and beloved rascal. The wild and mocking poetry of Peer Gynt has ended by overshadowing Brand in the popular judgment. But these two figures are interdependent and antithetical types who under different guises run through most of Ibsen’s classic work. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza , they are universal archetypes as well as unforgettable individuals. With these two poetic dramas, Ibsen won his battle with the world; he paused now to work out his future.

A philosophicalhistorical drama on the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate had long been on his mind; he finished it in 1873 under the title Kejser og Galilaeer ( Emperor and Galilean ), but in a ten-act form too diffuse and discursive for the stage. He wrote a modern satire, De unges forbund (1869; The League of Youth) and then after many preliminary drafts a prose satire on small-town politics, Samfundets støtter (1877; Pillars of Society ). But Ibsen had not yet found his proper voice; when he did, its effect was not to criticize or reform social life but to blow it up. The explosion came with Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House ). Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest This play presents a very ordinary family—a bank manager named Torvald Helmer, his wife Nora, and their three little children. Torvald supposes himself the ethical member of the family, while his wife assumes the role of a pretty irresponsible in order to flatter him.

Into this snug, not to say stifling, arrangement intrude several hard-minded outsiders, one of whom threatens to expose a fraud that Nora had once committed (without her husband’s knowledge) in order to obtain a loan needed to save his life. When Nora’s husband finally learns about this dangerous secret, he reacts with outrage and repudiates her out of concern for his own social reputation. Utterly disillusioned about her husband, whom she now sees as a hollow fraud, Nora declares her independence of him and their children and leaves them, slamming the door of the house behind her in the final scene. Audiences were scandalized at Ibsen’s refusal in A Doll’s House to scrape together (as any other contemporary playwright would have done) a “happy ending,” however shoddy or contrived. But that was not Ibsen’s way; his play was about knowing oneself and being true to that self. Torvald, who had thought all along that he was a sturdy ethical agent, proves to be a hypocrite and a weak compromiser; his wife is not only an ethical idealist, but a destructive one, as severe as Brand. The setting of A Doll’s House is ordinary to the point of transparency.

Ibsen’s plot exploits with cold precision the process known as “analytic exposition.” A secret plan (Nora’s forgery) is about to be concluded (she can now finish repaying the loan), but before the last step can be taken, a bit of the truth must be told, and the whole deception unravels. It is a pattern of stage action at once simple and powerful. Ibsen used this technique often, and it gained for him an international audience. Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano Ibsen’s next play, Gengangere (1881; Ghosts ), created even more dismay and distaste than its predecessor by showing worse consequences of covering up even more ugly truths. Ostensibly the play’s theme is congenital venereal disease, but on another level, it deals with the power of ingrained moral contamination to undermine the most determined idealism. Even after lecherous Captain Alving is in his grave, his ghost will not be laid to rest.

In the play, the lying memorial that his conventionally-minded widow has erected to his memory burns down even as his son goes insane from inherited syphilis and his illegitimate daughter advances inexorably toward her destiny in a brothel. The play is a grim study of contamination spreading through a family under cover of the widowed Mrs. Alving’s timidly respectable views. A play dealing with syphilis on top of one dealing with a wife’s abandonment of her family sealed Ibsen’s reputation as a Bad Old Man, but progressive theatres in England and all across the Continent began putting on his plays. His audiences were often small, but there were many of them, and they took his plays very seriously. So did conventionally-minded critics; they denounced Ibsen as if he had desecrated all that was sacred and holy. Ibsen’s response took the form of a direct dramatic counterattack. Doctor Stockmann, the hero of En folkefiende (1882; An Enemy of the People ), functions as Ibsen’s personal spokesman. In the play he is a medical officer, charged with inspecting the public baths on which the prosperity of his native town depends.

When he finds their water to be contaminated, he says so publicly, though the town officials and townspeople try to silence him. When he still insists on speaking the truth, he is officially declared an “enemy of the people.” Though portrayed as a victim, Doctor Stockmann, like all Ibsen’s idealistic truth-tellers after Brand, also carries within him a deep strain of destructiveness. (His attacks on the baths will, after all, ruin the town; it’s just that by comparison with the truth, he doesn’t care about this.) Ibsen’s next play would make this minor chord dominant. In Vildanden (1884; The Wild Duck ) Ibsen completely reversed his viewpoint by presenting on stage a gratuitous , destructive truth-teller whose compulsion visits catastrophic misery on a family of helpless innocents. With the help of a number of comforting delusions , Hjalmar Ekdal and his little family are living a somewhat squalid but essentially cheerful existence. Upon these helpless weaklings descends an infatuated truth-teller, Gregers Werle.

He cuts away the moral foundations (delusive as they are) on which the family has lived, leaving them despondent and shattered by the weight of a guilt too heavy to bear. The havoc wrought on the Ekdal family is rather pathetic than tragic; but the working out of the action achieves a kind of mournful poetry that is quite new in Ibsen’s repertoire . Each of this series of Ibsen’s classic modern dramas grows by extension or reversal out of its predecessor; they form an unbroken string. The last of the sequence is Rosmersholm (1886), in which variants of the destructive saint (Brand) and the all-too-human rogue (Peer) once more strive to define their identities, but this time on a level of moral sensitivity that gives the play a special air of silver serenity. Ex-parson Johannes Rosmer is the ethical personality, while the adventuress Rebecca West is his antagonist . Haunting them both out of the past is the spirit of the parson’s late wife, who had committed suicide under the subtle influence, we learn, of Rebecca West, and because of her husband’s high-minded indifference to sex.

At issue for the future is a choice between bold, unrestricted freedom and the ancient, conservative traditions of Rosmer’s house. But even as he is persuaded by Rebecca’s emancipated spirit, she is touched by his staid, decorous view of life. Each is contaminated by the other, and for differing but complementary reasons, they tempt one another toward the fatal millpond in which Rosmer’s wife drowned. The play ends with a double suicide in which both Rosmer and Rebecca, each for the other’s reasons, do justice on themselves. Ibsen’s playwriting career by no means ended with Rosmersholm, but thereafter he turned toward a more self-analytic and symbolic mode of writing that is quite different from the plays that made his world reputation. Among his later plays are Fruen fra havet (1888; The Lady from the Sea), Hedda Gabler (1890), Bygmester Solness (1892; The Master Builder), Lille Eyolf (1894; Little Eyolf ), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and Naar vi døde vaagner (1899; When We Dead Awaken ).

Two of these plays, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder , are vitalized by the presence of a demonically idealistic and totally destructive female such as first appeared in Catiline. Another obsessive personage in these late plays is an aging artist who is bitterly aware of his failing powers. Personal and confessional feelings infuse many of these last dramas; perhaps these resulted from Ibsen’s decision in 1891 to return to Norway, or perhaps from the series of fascinated, fearful dalliances he had with young women in his later years. After his return to Norway, Ibsen continued to write plays until a stroke in 1900 and another a year later reduced him to a bedridden invalid. He died in Kristiania in 1906. Ibsen was in the forefront of those early modern authors whom one could refer to as the great disturbers; he belongs with Fyodor Dostoyevsky , Friedrich Nietzsche , and William Blake . Ibsen wrote plays about mostly prosaic and commonplace persons; but from them he elicited insights of devastating directness, great subtlety, and occasional flashes of rare beauty.

His plots are not cleverly contrived games but deliberate acts of cognition, in which persons are stripped of their accumulated disguises and forced to acknowledge their true selves, for better or worse. Thus, he made his audiences reexamine with painful earnestness the moral foundation of their being. During the last half of the 19th century he turned the European stage back from what it had become—a plaything and a distraction for the bored—to make it what it had been long ago among the ancient Greeks, an instrument for passing doom-judgment on the soul. Ibsen Project translating letters of Norwegian playwright | Office of News & Media Relations | UMass Amherst Ibsen Project translating letters of Norwegian playwright December 6, 2006 Contact: By Daniel J. Fitzgibbons As the centenary year of the death of Henrik Ibsen draws to a close, a project based in the German and Scandinavian Studies Program is working to help preserve the legacy of the Norwegian playwright by translating his letters into English. Led by Rune Engebretsen, a visiting adjunct professor and Ibsen scholar from Concordia College in Minnesota, the project is a massive scholarly undertaking involving more than 1,500 pages of letters.

The goal, says Engebretsen, is to produce four double volumes of translations accompanied by text and commentaries contributed by other Ibsen scholars. Since many of the letters were written by Ibsen during his travels through Europe in the late 19th century, they could be a trove of information for historians. “You can almost use them as travel guides,” says Engebretsen. “The kind of potential this has for researchers from all sorts of fields is significant.” Engebretsen, who is a research scholar at the Centre for Ibsen Studies in Oslo, says the English translation is an important complement to another project underway in Norway: the production and publication of a 30-volume collection of Ibsen’s texts and scholarly commentaries. That effort began in 1998 and involves a dozen scholars and is the biggest humanities project in Norwegian history, he says. Those unfamiliar with Ibsen may not realize his undiminished global appeal, says James Cathey, head of the German and Scandinavian Studies. More than 8,000 events were planned in 81 countries this year to celebrate Ibsen, who produced more plays than Shakespeare.

Each year, Ibsen plays such as “Hedda Gabler,” “Peer Gynt,” “An Enemy of the People,” “A Doll’s House” and “The Master Builder” are read in more than 100 languages amd produced hundreds of times every year on stages around the world. Cathey says Ibsen’s frank approach to controversial issues has also made the playwright one of the most banned writers in the world. “He touches a lot of buttons that are still hot today,” he says, ticking off a list of contentious subjects such as syphilis, euthanasia, incest and child abuse, environmental justice, hypocrisy, freedom of speech and repression of women. Ibsen’s work provides deep insights into morality and human behavior, according to Engebretsen, “especially the interaction between men and women.” The translator says the English-language version of Ibsen’s letters should broaden appreciation and understanding of Ibsen, who is regarded as Norwegian national hero. Although the translation phase of the project is moving ahead, Germanic and Scandinavian Studies is seeking external research funding to support the work, says Cathey, who hopes to have some word on grant applications by next summer.

Engebretsen is also involved in other preparatory work, including the formation of a steering committee and board of editorial advisors and bringing in other translators. “We’re focusing on quality as we move into the next phase,” he says. “Good translation is teamwork.” Film: Hedda Gabler / Henrik Ibsen - YouTube Film: Hedda Gabler / Henrik Ibsen 4,898 views Last updated on Jan 29, 2015 Hedda Gabler is a play published in 1890 by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premiered in 1891 in Germany to negative reviews, but has subsequently gained recognition as a classic of realism, nineteenth century theatre, and world drama. A 1902 production starring Minnie Maddern Fiske was a major sensation on Broadway and following its initial limited run was revived with the same actress the next year.

Some critics consider the character of Hedda one of the great dramatic roles in theatre, and some portrayals have been very controversial, especially the Australian production where a male plays Hedda.[citation needed] Depending on the interpretation, Hedda may be portrayed as an idealistic heroine fighting society, a victim of circumstance, a prototypical feminist, or a manipulative villain. Hedda's married name is Hedda Tesman; Gabler is her maiden name. On the subject of the title, Ibsen wrote: "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife."

Question: Which Norwegian playwright wrote "Hedda Gabler", "The Master Builder" and "Peer Gynt"?
Answer: Henrik Ibsen