From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Henrik Ibsen | |
|---|---|
| Henrik Ibsen by Eilif Peterssen, 1895 | |
| Born | Henrik Johan Ibsen 20 March 1828 Skien, Telemark, Norway |
| Died | 23 May 1906 (aged 78) Kristiania, Norway (modern Oslo) |
| Occupation | Writer, playwright |
| Genres | Naturalism |
| Notable works | Peer Gynt (1867) A Doll’s House (1879) Ghosts (1881) An Enemy of the People (1882) The Wild Duck (1884) Rosmersholm (1886) Hedda Gabler (1890) |
| Spouse | Suzannah Thoresen (m. 1858) |
| Children | Sigurd Ibsen |
| Relatives | Knud Ibsen (father) Marichen Altenburg (mother) |
| Signature |
Henrik Johan Ibsen (/ˈɪbsən/;[1] Norwegian: [ˈhɛ̀nrɪk ˈɪ̀psn̩]; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as “the father of realism” and one of the most influential playwrights of his time.[2] 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, When We Dead Awaken, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare,[3][4] and A Doll’s House was the world’s most performed play in 2006.[5]
Ibsen’s early poetic and cinematic play Peer Gynt has strong surreal elements.[6] After Peer Gynt Ibsen abandoned verse and wrote in realistic prose. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen’s later work examined the realities that lay behind the facades, revealing much that was disquieting to a number of his contemporaries. He had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. In many critics’ estimates The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm are “vying with each other as rivals for the top place among Ibsen’s works”;[7] Ibsen himself regarded Emperor and Galilean as his masterpiece.[8]
Ibsen is often ranked as one of the most distinguished playwrights in the European tradition,[9] and is widely regarded as the foremost playwright of the nineteenth century.[9][10] He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O’Neill, and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904.[11]
Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway during his lifetime)[12] 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. Ibsen’s dramas were informed by his own background in the merchant elite of Skien, and he often modelled or named characters after family members. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. Ibsen’s dramas had a strong influence upon contemporary culture.
Early life and background
Family and childhood
Charitas, the ship captained by Henrik’s grandfather of the same name when he died at sea outside Grimstad in 1797. The Dannebrog was the common flag of Denmark-Norway.
Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828 in Stockmanngården into an affluent merchant family in the prosperous port town of Skien in Bratsberg. He was the son of the merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen (1797–1877) and Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg (1799–1869). Both parents’ belonged to the city’s and county’s elite; Ibsen’s ancestors were primarily merchants and shipowners in large cities, or members of the “aristocracy of officials” of Upper Telemark. Henrik Ibsen later wrote that “my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien” and that he was closely related to “just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings.”[13][14] He was baptised at home in the Lutheran state church—membership of which was mandatory—on 28 March and the baptism was confirmed in Christian’s Church on 19 June.[15] When Ibsen was born, Skien had for centuries been one of Norway’s most important and internationally oriented cities, and a centre of seafaring, timber exports and early industrialization that had made Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark-Norway.[15]A silhouette (ca. 1820) of the Altenburg/Paus family in Altenburggården, with Ibsen’s mother (far right), maternal grandparents (centre) and other relatives. It is the only existing portrait of either of Ibsen’s parents.
His parents, though not closely related by blood, had been reared as social first cousins, sometimes described as near-siblings in a social sense.[16] Knud Ibsen’s father, ship’s captain and merchant Henrich Johan Ibsen (1765–1797), died at sea when he was newborn in 1797 and his mother Johanne Plesner (1770–1847) married captain Ole Paus (1766–1855) the following year; Knud grew up as a member of the Paus family. His stepfather Ole Paus was a descendant of the “aristocracy of officials” in Upper Telemark; as a child Paus had been taken in by a relative, Skien merchant Christopher Blom, and he had become a ship’s captain and shipowner in Skien, acquiring the burghership in 1788. Like Henrich Johan Ibsen before him Paus became the brother-in-law of one of Norway’s wealthiest men, Diderik von Cappelen, whose first wife Maria Plesner was Johanne’s sister. In 1799 Ole Paus sold the Ibsen House in Skien’s Løvestrædet (Lion’s Street), which he had inherited from his wife’s first husband, and bought the estate Rising outside Skien from a sister of his brother-in-law von Cappelen. Knud grew up at Rising with most of his many half-siblings, among them the later governor Christian Cornelius Paus and the shipowner Christopher Blom Paus. In the 1801 census the Paus family of Rising had seven servants.[15]The roof and one of the windows of Altenburggården can be seen in the middle of the picture. Altenburggården was Marichen Altenburg’s childhood home, and Henrik Ibsen lived there aged 3–8Venstøp outside Skien, originally the Ibsen family’s summer house, where they lived permanently 1836–1843. It was a reasonably large farm with large, representative buildings.
Marichen grew up in the large, stately Altenburggården building in central Skien as the daughter of the wealthy merchant Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763–1824) and Hedevig Christine Paus [no] (1763–1848), who was the sister of Knud’s stepfather. Altenburg was a shipowner, timber merchant and owned a liquor distillery at Lundetangen and a farm outside of town; after his death in 1824 the widow Hedevig, Henrik’s grandmother, took over the businesses. During Henrik’s childhood the families of Ole and Hedevig Paus were very close: Ole’s oldest son, Knud’s half-brother Henrik Johan Paus was raised in Hedevig’s home, and the children of the Paus siblings, including Knud and Marichen, spent much of their childhood together. Older Ibsen scholars have claimed that Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents’ “strange, almost incestuous marriage,” and he would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably his masterpiece Rosmersholm.[17] On the other hand, Jørgen Haave points out that his parents’ close relationship wasn’t that unusual among the Skien elite.[15]
In 1825 Henrik’s father Knud acquired the burghership of Skien and established an independent business as a timber and luxury goods merchant there with his younger brother Christopher Blom Paus, then aged 15, as his apprentice. The two brothers moved into the Stockmanngården building, where they rented a part of the building and lived with a maid. On the first floor the brothers sold foreign wines and a variety of luxury items, while also engaging in wholesale export of timber in cooperation with their first cousin Diderik von Cappelen (1795–1866). On 1 December 1825 Knud married his stepfather’s niece Marichen, who then moved in with them. Henrik was born there in 1828. In 1830 Marichen’s mother Hedevig left Altenburggården and her properties and business ventures to her son-in-law Knud, and the Ibsen family moved to Marichen’s childhood home in 1831. During the 1820s and 1830s Knud was a wealthy young merchant in Skien, and he was the city’s 16th largest taxpayer in 1833.[15]
In his unfinished biography From Skien to Rome Henrik Ibsen wrote about the Skien of his childhood:
In my childhood, Skien was an extremely joyful and festive town, quite the opposite of what it would later become. Many highly cultured, prosperous families at that time lived partly in the city itself, partly on large farms in the area. Close or more remote kinship connected most of these families amongst themselves, and balls, dinner parties, and musical soirées came one after another in rapid succession both during winters and summers. […] Visits from strangers were almost a constant occurrence at our spacious farmhouse and especially around Christmastime and the market days, our townhouse was full and the table was set from morning to nightfall.— Henrik Ibsen[18]
When Henrik Ibsen was around seven years old, his father’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, and in 1835 the family was forced to sell Altenburggården. The following year they moved to their stately summer house, Venstøp [no], outside of the city.[19] They were still relatively affluent, had servants and socialised with other members of the Skien elite, e.g. through lavish parties; their closest neighbours on Southern Venstøp were former shipowner and mayor of Skien Ulrich Frederik Cudrio and his family, who also had been forced to sell their townhouse.[15] In 1843, after Henrik left home, the Ibsen family moved to a townhouse at Snipetorp, owned by Knud Ibsen’s half-brother and former apprentice Christopher, who had established himself as an independent merchant in Skien in 1836 and who eventually become one of the city’s leading shipowners.[20] Knud continued to struggle to maintain his business and had some success in the 1840s, but in the 1850s his business ventures and professional activities came to an end, and he became reliant on the support from his successful younger half-brothers.[15]
Myths and reassessment
Older Ibsen historiography has often claimed that Knud Ibsen experienced financial ruin and became an alcoholic tyrant, that the family lost contact with the elite it had belonged to, and that this had a strong influence on Henrik Ibsen’s biography and work. Newer Ibsen scholarship, in particular Jørgen Haave‘s book Familien Ibsen [The Ibsen Family], has refuted such claims and Haave has pointed out that older biographical works have uncritically repeated numerous unfounded myths about both of Ibsen’s parents, and about the playwright’s childhood and background in general.[15]
Haave points out that Knud Ibsen’s economic problems in the 1830s were mainly the result of the difficult times and something the Ibsen family had in common with most members of the bourgeoisie; Haave further argues that Henrik Ibsen had a happy and comfortable childhood as a member of the upper class, even after the family moved to Venstøp, and that they were able to maintain their lifestyle and patrician identity with the help of their extended family and accumulated cultural capital.[15] Contrary to the incorrect claims that Ibsen had been born in a small or remote town, Haave points out that Skien had been Eastern Norway’s leading commercial city for centuries, and a centre of seafaring, timber exports and early industrialization that had made Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark-Norway.[15]
Haave points out that virtually all of Ibsen’s ancestors had been wealthy burghers and higher government officials, and members of the local and regional elites in the areas they lived, often of continental European ancestry. He argues that “the Ibsen family belonged to an elite that distanced itself strongly from the common farmer population, and considered itself part of an educated European culture” and that “it was this patrician class that formed his cultural identity and upbringing.”[21] Haave points to many examples of both Henrik Ibsen and other members of his family having a condescending attitude towards common Norwegian farmers, viewing them as “some sort of primitive indigenous population,”[15] and being very conscious of their own identity as members of the sophisticated upper class; Haave describes Henrik as a boy who was pampered by his father, who liked to be creative in solitude, and who provoked peers with his superiority and arrogance.[15] Haave points out that the Ibsen family—Knud, Marichen and Henrik’s siblings—disintegrated financially and socially in the 1850s, but that it happened after Henrik had left home, at a time when he was establishing himself as a successful man of theatre, while his extended family, such as his uncles Paus, were firmly established in Skien’s elite.[15] Haave argues that the story of the Ibsen family is the story of the slow collapse of a patrician merchant family amid the emergence of a new democratic society in the 19th century, and that Henrik Ibsen, like others of his class, had to find new opportunities to maintain his social position.[15]
Literary influence of his childhood
Many Ibsen scholars have compared characters and themes in his plays to his family and upbringing; his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society. Ibsen himself confirmed that he both modelled and named characters in his plays after his own family.[20][22] However, Haave criticizes the uncritical use of Ibsen’s dramas as biographical sources and the “naive” readings of them as reflections of his family members.[15]
Early career
Grimstad years
At fifteen, Ibsen left school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist. At that time he began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was 18, he had a liaison with Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen which produced a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkdalen, whose upbringing Ibsen paid for until the boy was fourteen, though Ibsen never saw Hans Jacob. Ibsen went to Christiania (later spelled Kristiania and then 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 Catilina (1850), was published under the pseudonym “Brynjolf Bjarme”, when he was only 22, 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.[23] Ibsen’s main inspiration in the early period, right up to Peer Gynt, was apparently the 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.
Ibsen as a theatre director
He spent the next several years employed at Det norske 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 difficult financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway.
Years in exile
One of the oldest photographs of Ibsen from ca. 1863/64, around the time he began writing BrandIbsen (far left) with friends in Rome, ca. 1867
In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He spent the next 27 years in Italy and Germany and would only visit Norway a few times.
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.[24][25]
With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgements 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.[citation needed]
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 began work on his first contemporary realist drama The Pillars of Society, first published and performed in 1877.[26] A Doll’s House followed in 1879. This play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen’s society.
Ibsen was already in his fifties when A Doll’s House was published. He himself saw his latter plays as a series. At the end of his career, he described them as “that series of dramas which began with A Doll’s House and which is now completed with When We Dead Awaken”.[27] Furthermore, it was the reception of A Doll’s House which brought Ibsen international acclaim.
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.[28]
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, Ibsen’s 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 saw himself as an objective observer of society, “like a lone franc tireur in the outposts”, playing a lone hand, as he put it.[29] Ibsen, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, relied upon immediate sources such as newspapers and second-hand report for his contact with intellectual thought. He claimed to be ignorant of books, leaving them to his wife and son, but, as Georg Brandes described, “he seemed to stand in some mysterious correspondence with the fermenting, germinating ideas of the day.[30]
The Wild Duck (1884) is by many considered Ibsen’s finest work, and it is certainly one of the most complex, alongside Rosmersholm. 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]Letter from Ibsen to his English reviewer and translator Edmund Gosse: “30.8.[18]99. Dear Mr. Edmund Gosse! It was to me a hearty joy to receive your letter. So I will finally personally meet you and your wife. I am at home every day in the morning until 1 o’clock. I am happy and surprised at your excellent Norwegian! Your amicably obliged Henrik Ibsen.”
Late in his career, Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society’s moral values and more to do with the problems of individuals. 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 and A Doll’s House are regularly cited as Ibsen’s most popular and influential plays,[31] with the title role of Hedda regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day.
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 theatre 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[citation needed]. His works were brought to an English-speaking audience, largely thanks to the efforts of William Archer and Edmund Gosse. These in turn 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. Modernism was on the rise, not only in the theatre, but across public life.[citation needed]. Michael Meyer’s translations in the 1950s were welcomed by actors and directors as playable, rather than academic. As The Times newspaper put it, ‘This, one may think, is how Ibsen might have expressed himself in English’.
Ibsen intentionally obscured his influences. However, asked later what he had read when he wrote Catiline, Ibsen replied that he had read only the Danish Norse saga-inspired Romantic tragedian Adam Oehlenschläger and Ludvig Holberg, “the Scandinavian Molière”.[32]
Critical reception
Ibsen caricatured by SNAPP for Vanity Fair, 1901
At the time when Ibsen was writing, literature was emerging as a formidable force in 19th century society.[33] With the vast increase in literacy towards the end of the century, the possibilities of literature being used for subversion struck horror into the heart of the Establishment. Ibsen’s plays, from A Doll’s House onwards, caused an uproar: not just in Norway, but throughout Europe, and even across the Atlantic in America. No other artist, apart from Richard Wagner, had such an effect internationally, inspiring almost blasphemous adoration and hysterical abuse.[34]
After the publication of Ghosts, he wrote: “while the storm lasted, I have made many studies and observations and I shall not hesitate to exploit them in my future writings.”[35] Indeed, his next play An Enemy of the People was initially regarded by the critics to be simply his response to the violent criticism which had greeted Ghosts. Ibsen expected criticism: as he wrote to his publisher: “Ghosts will probably cause alarm in some circles, but it can’t be helped. If it did not, there would have been no necessity for me to have written it.”[36]
Ibsen didn’t just read the critical reaction to his plays, he actively corresponded with critics, publishers, theatre directors and newspaper editors on the subject. The interpretation of his work, both by critics and directors, concerned him greatly. He often advised directors on which actor or actress would be suitable for a particular role. (An example of this is a letter he wrote to Hans Schroder in November 1884, with detailed instructions for the production of The Wild Duck.[37])
Ibsen’s plays initially reached a far wider audience as read plays rather than in performance. It was 20 years, for instance, before the authorities would allow Ghosts to be performed in Norway. Each new play that Ibsen wrote, from 1879 onwards, had an explosive effect on intellectual circles. This was greatest for A Doll’s House and Ghosts, and it did lessen with the later plays, but the translation of Ibsen’s works into German, French and English during the decade following the initial publication of each play and frequent new productions as and when permission was granted, meant that Ibsen remained a topic of lively conversation throughout the latter decades of the 19th century. When A Doll’s House was published, it had an explosive effect: it was the centre of every conversation at every social gathering in Christiania. One hostess even wrote on the invitations to her soirée, “You are politely requested not to mention Mr Ibsen’s new play”.[38]
Death
On 23 May 1906, Ibsen died in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania (now Oslo)[39] 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 pm.[40]
Your children are not your children.
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