Henrik Ibsen

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Henrik Johan Ibsen (k psn.]; Norwegian: 20 March 1828 – 19 May 1906; Henrik Johan Ibsen; Norwegian: [H]k psn; 20 March 1828 to May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time, as one of the founders of modernism in theatre. Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, When We Dead Awaken, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder are among his notable contributions. Ibsen is the most often performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House was the world's most staged performance in 2006.

Peer Gynt, Ibsen's earliest poetic and cinematic play, has a lot of bizarre elements. After Peer Gynt Ibsen's book was abandoned, Ibsen wrote in more concrete prose. Several of his later dramas were deemed scandalous by several of his years, when European theatre was supposed to model stringent morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later research explored the truth that lay behind the façades, uncovering much that was surprising to a number of his contemporaries. He had a critical eye on life and morality, and he opened a free inquiry into the conditions of life and morality. According to several commentators, The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm are "vying for the top position among Ibsen's works,"; Ibsen regarded Emperor and Galilean as his masterpiece;

Ibsen is often regarded as one of Europe's most influential playwrights, and he is often regarded as the nation's best playwright of the nineteenth century. He inspired others, including George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, Marguerite Yourcenar, Eugene O'Neill, and Miroslav Krleut. In 1902, 1903, and 1904, Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ibsen wrote his Danish script (the common written language of Denmark and Norway during his lifetime) and they were published by Danish publisher Gyldendal. Despite the fact that the bulk of his plays are set in Norway, he grew up in Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, but he rarely visited Norway in his most productive years. Ibsen's dramas were inspired by his own experience in Skien's business class, and he frequently modeled or named characters after family members. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. Ibsen's dramas had a major influence on contemporary life.

Early life and background

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born in Stockmanng, Germany, on March 20th, 1828, transforming it into an affluent merchant family. He was the son of merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen (1797–1867) and Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg (1799–1869). Both parents' were born into the city's and county's upper crust. Ibsen's ancestors were mostly merchants and shipowners in major cities, or representatives of the "aristocracy of officials" of Upper Telemark. "My parents were members of both sides of the most respected families in Skien," Henrik Ibsen later wrote, and that he was closely related to "about all the patrician families that then ruled the area and its surroundings." He was baptized at home in the Lutheran state church, membership of which was mandatory—on March 28th, and the baptism was confirmed in Christian's Church on June 19th. Skien had been one of Norway's most influential and international oriented cities for centuries, as well as a center of seafaring, timber exports, and early industrialization that had made Norway Norway Norway the country's most developed and prosperous region of Denmark-Norway.

His parents, though not closely related by blood, had been raised as social first cousins, who were often referred to as near-siblings in a social sense. Henrich Johan Ibsen, the ship's captain and merchant who died at sea in 1797, and his mother Johanne Plesner (1770-1870) died in the following year; Knud grew up as a member of the Paus family. Ole Paus' stepfather, a descendant of Upper Telemark's "aristocracy of officials," took Paus as a child by a relative, Skien merchant Christopher Blom, and the ship's captain and ship owner in Skien, who acquired the burghership in 1788. Like Henrich Johan Ibsen before him, Paus became the brother-in-law of Norway's richest man, Diderik von Cappelen, whose first wife Maria Plesner was Johanne's sister. Ole Paus sold the Ibsen House in Skien's L'vestr'det (Lion's Street), which he had inherited from his wife's first husband, in 1799, and purchased the estate Rising outside of Skien from a sister of his brother-in-law von Cappelen. With the majority of his many half-siblings, including former governor Christian Cornelius Paus and shipowner Christopher Blom Paus, he grew up at Rising. In the 1801 census, the Paus family of Rising had seven servants.

Marichen grew up in the large, stately Altenburggrden building in central Skien as the daughter of wealthy merchant Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763-1824) and Hedevig Christine Paus (1763-1878), who was the sister of Knud's stepfather. Altenburg, a ship owner, timber merchant, and a liquor distillery at Lundetangen and a farm outside of town; after his death in 1824, Henrik's grandmother, Henrik's widow Hedevig, took over the business. The families of Ole and Hedevig Paus were close during Henrik's youth: Knud's half-brother Henrik Johan Paus was born in Hedevig's house, and the Paus children, including Knud and Marichen, spent significant portions of their childhood together. Henrik Ibsen's "strange, almost incestuous marriage" had intrigued his parents, and he'd explore in several plays, particularly Rosmersholm. On the other hand, Jrgen Haave points out that his parents' closeness with him was not that unusual among the Skien elite.

Knud's father, who was born in 1825, bought the burghership of Skien and formed an independent firm as a timber and luxury goods merchant, as his apprentice. The two brothers moved into the Stockmanngrden home, where they rented a portion of the building and lived with a maid. The brothers sold international wines and a variety of luxury items on the first floor of their first cousin Diderik von Cappelen (1795–1866). Knud's niece Marichen was born on December 1st, and they later moved in with them. Henrik was born in 1828. Hedevig, a mother from 1830, married Hedevig of Altenburggrden, along with her son-in-law Knud, and the Ibsen family relocated to Marichen's hometown in 1831. Knud was a wealthy young merchant in Skien, and he was the city's 16th largest taxpayer in 1833.

Henrik Ibsen wrote about the Skien of his childhood in his unfinished biography.

Henrik Ibsen's fortunes turned for the worse when he was seven years old, and the family was forced to sell Altenburggrden in 1835. They moved outside of the city to Venst, the city's stately summer house. They were still wealthy, had servants, and socialized with other Skien elites, e.g. Former shipowner and mayor of Skien Ulrich Cudrio and his family, who were also forced to sell their townhouse, were among their closest neighbors on Southern Venst. The Ibsen family purchased a Sniborp townhouse in 1843, when Henrik left home, and Christopher Ibsen, a former apprentice, became one of the city's top shipowners, a Snud Ibsen brothers and former apprentice, Robert Ibsen's half-brother and former apprentice. Knud's continued to struggle with his trade in the 1840s and had some success in the 1850s, but his business ventures and professional activities came to an end, and he became reliant on the help of his wealthy younger half-brothers.

Ibsen'storiography has often stated that Knud Ibsen suffered financial hardship and became an alcoholic tyrant, that the family lost touch with the elite it had belonged to, and that this had a huge effect on Henrik Ibsen's biography and work. Jrgen Haave's book Families [The Ibsen Family] by Jürgen Haave has debunk such claims, and Haave has pointed out that older biographical books have uncritically reiterated numerous unfounded myths about both of Ibsen's parents and the playwright's general history.

Knud Ibsen's economic woes in the 1830s were mainly a result of the famines and something the Ibsen family had in common with most members of the upper class; Haave adds that Henrik Ibsen had a happy and prosperous childhood as a member of the upper class, and that they were able to maintain their ethnicity and patrician identity with the support of their extended family and amassed cultural capital. Contrary to the incorrect assertions that Ibsen was born in a small or remote town, Haave argues that Skien had been Eastern Norway's largest industrial city for decades, as well as a center of seafaring, timber exports, and early industrialization that had made Norway the most developed and prosperous area of Denmark-Norway.

Haave points out that virtually all of Ibsen's ancestors, including wealthy burghers and top government executives, as well as members of the local and regional elites in the towns they lived, many of continental European ancestry. "The Ibsen family belonged to an elite that stood far removed from the common farmer population and regarded itself as a part of an educated European culture," he says, and that "it was this patrician class that gave him his ethnic identity and upbringing." Both Henrik Ibsen and other members of his family's traditional ethnic group were increasingly taken seriously as representatives of the modern upper class; Haave likes Henrik Ibsen's father as a boy who was pampered by his father, who liked to be in solitude, and who triggered peers with his piety and arrogance. Haave argues that the Ibsen family, along with Knud, Marichen, and Henrik's children, disintegrated economically and socially in the 1850s, but that it happened after Henrik left home, when his extended family, including his uncles Paus, was solidly established in Skien's society. Haave argues that the Ibsen family's tale was about the gradual demise of a patrician merchant family amid the emergence of a new democratic society in the 19th century, and that Henrik Ibsen, like others in his class, had to find new opportunities to keep his social standing.

Many Ibsen scholars have compared characters and plots in his plays to his family and upbringing; his themes often concern financial hardship as well as moral issues arising from society's dark secrets. After his own family's death, Ibsen himself revealed that he and named characters in his scripts. However, Haave condemns Ibsen's uncritical use of his dramas as biographical sources and the "naive" readings of them as family members' remembrance.

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Early career

Ibsen left school at the age of 15. He went to Grimstad, Maine, to become an apprentice pharmacist. He began writing plays at that time. When Ibsen was 18, he had a friendship with Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen, which produced a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkdalen, who was not paid for until the boy was fourteen years old, but Ibsen never saw Hans Jacob. Ibsen went to Christiania (later spelled Kristiania and then renamed Oslo) with the intention of matriculate at the university. He quickly dismissed the theory (his first attempts at transferring university were refused because he did not pass any of his entrance exams), opting instead to write. When he was only 22, his first play, "Brynjolf Bjarme," was released, but it was not well-received. The Burial Mound (1850), his first play to be staged, received no interest. Despite this, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, but the numerous plays he wrote in the ensuing years were not successful. Ibsen's main inspiration in the early period, right up to Peer Gynt, was evidently Henrik Wergeland and the Norwegian folk tales collected by Peter Christen Asbjrn and Jrgen Moe. Wergeland was the most revered, Norwegian poet, and playwright in Ibsen's youth, and by far the most read, Norwegian poet, and playwright.

He spent the next several years at Det Norske Theater (Bergen), where he appeared in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. He released five new, although largely unremarkable, plays during this period. Despite Ibsen's inability as a playwright, he gained a lot of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, which was to be useful as he continued writing.

Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to serve as the Christiania Theatre's creative director. He married Suzannah Thoresen on June 1858, and she gave birth to Sigurd, their only child. The couple lived in difficult financial circumstances, and Ibsen became dissatisfied with life in Norway.

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