Ibsen

Ibsen the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), a central figure in the development of modern drama and the father of theatrical realism. His prose plays, among them A Doll's House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, turned the stage toward the problems of contemporary life and exercised an influence on the drama of the twentieth century that few writers have equalled.

Early Life and Apprenticeship

Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 at Skien, a small port in southern Norway, the son of a merchant family that fell into financial difficulty during his childhood. The experience of a comfortable home reduced to genteel poverty left a lasting mark on his imagination, and the themes of debt, respectability and social pressure recur throughout his work. He left school early and was apprenticed to an apothecary in nearby Grimstad.

He wrote his first plays during his years as a chemist's assistant, and in 1850 he moved to Christiania, now Oslo, hoping to enter the university. He failed to do so but began to make a career in the theatre. He was appointed playwright and stage manager at the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen, where he was obliged to write and produce plays and where he learned the practical art of the stage.

In 1857 he became artistic director of the theatre in Christiania, but the enterprise was a financial failure and left him bitter. In 1864, helped by a grant, he left Norway for Italy in a self-imposed exile that lasted, with brief returns, for more than twenty years. The distance from home gave him the perspective from which he would later anatomise Norwegian life.

Verse Dramas and Philosophical Works

His early reputation was made with historical and verse dramas that drew on Scandinavian saga and folklore. The Feast at Solhaug and Lady Inger of Ostrat won attention, and Peer Gynt (1867), a fantastic verse drama based on folk legend, remains one of the great works of Norwegian literature. Its wandering hero, at once a scoundrel and a dreamer, became a symbol of the national character.

The poem and drama on which his international fame began to rest was Brand (1866), a verse tragedy about a priest who follows his principles to a ruinous extreme. With its uncompromising demand that a person live wholly by the truth, it defined one of the abiding concerns of his later work, the conflict between ideal and compromise. Both Brand and Peer Gynt sold widely and brought him recognition.

He followed with a great double drama on the struggles of an emperor, Emperor and Galilean, in which Julian the Apostate stands between the old religion and the new. Though he then abandoned verse for prose, the philosophical seriousness of these dramas carried over into the realistic plays that made him the leading dramatist of his age.

The Realistic Prose Plays

From 1877 Ibsen turned to prose and to the problems of contemporary society. Pillars of Society, A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882) examine the hidden corruption of respectable life and the cost of telling the truth. A Doll's House, in which Nora leaves her husband and children, caused a scandal and made the position of women a subject for the serious stage.

Ghosts went further, treating inherited disease and conventional morality with a frankness that shocked audiences and was at first refused by the theatres. An Enemy of the People answered his critics with the story of a physician who is declared a public enemy for revealing that the town's baths are poisoned. In The Wild Duck (1884) he turned upon his own ideals, questioning whether truth is always to be told and whether the ordinary life can bear it.

In the later plays, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder and Little Eyolf, the social analysis gives way to a deeper, more symbolic exploration of guilt, vocation and the destructive power of the past. Hedda Gabler, with its bored and manipulative heroine, is among the most enduringly performed of all his works and a milestone in the portrayal of a complex woman on the stage.

Method, Ideas and Technique

Ibsen transformed the technique of the stage. He replaced the sprawling plots of earlier drama with a tight, retrospective structure in which the catastrophe has already occurred before the play begins and the action consists in the gradual revelation of the past. This method of unburdening the past, sustained by a close attention to the details of an ordinary room, gave the theatre a means of analysing character in depth.

His dialogue is at once realistic and charged with meaning. The characters speak in the idiom of daily life while the words they use accumulate significance beneath the surface, so that a remark about a stove or a letter can carry the weight of a whole history. This double quality, plain speech bearing hidden import, became one of the great instruments of modern dramatic writing.

His central concerns are the individual against society, the claims of truth against the consolations of illusion, and the way in which the past holds the present in bond. He was impatient with easy optimism and with systems that sacrifice the person to the idea, and his plays refuse to resolve their conflicts in comfortable moral lessons. The result is a body of drama that is at once a criticism of society and a meditation on what it means to be free.

Influence and Legacy

Ibsen's influence on the modern theatre has been enormous. He gave the realistic drama intellectual respectability and established the serious treatment of social and psychological questions as a possibility of the stage. The problem play, the retrospective form and the use of symbolic objects all descend from his example, and dramatists from Shaw to O'Neill to Miller have acknowledged their debt.

His works provoked intense controversy in his lifetime and were censored and attacked in many countries, but they were also championed by a new generation of critics and actors. Their translation into English and other languages spread his reputation worldwide, and the role of Nora became a defining part for actresses and a touchstone in the discussion of women's place in society.

He is recognised as the founder of modern prose drama and as one of the most performed playwrights in the world. In Norway he is a national figure, and his plays remain central to the repertoire of serious theatre. By turning the stage toward the difficult questions of modern life, he gave drama a new seriousness from which it has never retreated.

See also

• Realism in the theatre
• A Doll's House
• Norwegian literature
• Problem play