Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Six Plays A Doll's House Ghosts Hedda Gabler The Master Builder by Henr Henrik . , considered by many to be the father of modern prose drama, was born in , , on March 20, 1828. He was the second of six children. Ibsen’s father was a prominent merchant, but he went bankrupt when Ibsen was eight years old, so Ibsen spent much of his early life living in poverty. From 1851 to 1864, he worked in theaters in Bergen and in what is now Oslo (then called Christiania). At age twenty-one, Ibsen wrote his first play, a five-act tragedy called Catiline. Like much of his early work, Catiline was written in verse. In 1858, Ibsen married Suzannah Thoreson, and eventually had one son with her. Ibsen felt that, rather than merely live together, husband and wife should live as equals, free to become their own human beings. (This belief can be seen clearly in his play A Doll’s House. ) Consequently, Ibsen’s critics attacked him for failing to respect the institution of marriage. Like his private life, Ibsen’s writing tended to stir up sensitive social issues, and some corners of Norwegian society frowned upon his work. Sensing criticism in Oslo about not only his work but also his private life, Ibsen moved to Italy in 1864 with the support of a traveling grant and a stipend from the Norwegian government. He spent the next twenty-seven years living abroad, mostly in Italy and Germany. Ibsen’s early years as a playwright were not lucrative, but he did gain valuable experience during this time. In 1866, Ibsen published his first major theatrical success, a lyric drama called Brand. He followed it with another well-received verse play, Peer Gynt. These two works helped solidify Ibsen’s reputation as one of the premier Norwegian dramatists of his era. In 1879, while living in Italy, Ibsen published his masterpiece, A Doll’s House. Unlike Peer Gynt and Brand, A Doll’s House was written in prose. It is widely considered a landmark in the development of what soon became a highly prevalent genre of theater—realism, which strives to portray life accurately and shuns idealized visions of it. In A Doll’s House, Ibsen employs the themes and structures of classical tragedy while writing in prose about everyday, unexceptional people. A Doll’s House also manifests Ibsen’s concern for women’s rights, and for human rights in general. Ibsen followed A Doll’s House with two additional plays written in an innovative, realistic mode: Ghosts, in 1881, and An Enemy of the People, in 1882. Both were successes. Ibsen began to gain international recognition, and his works were produced across Europe and translated into many different languages. In his later work, Ibsen moved away from realistic drama to tackle questions of a psychological and subconscious nature. Accordingly, symbols began to gain prominence in his plays. Among the works he wrote in this symbolist period are The Wild Duck (1884) and Hedda Gabler (1890). Hedda Gabler was the last play Ibsen wrote while living abroad. In 1891, he returned to Oslo. His later dramas include The Master Builder (1892) and Little Eyolf (1896). Eventually, a crippling sickness afflicted Ibsen and prevented him from writing. He died on May 23, 1906. Henrik Ibsen Study Guides. Henrik Ibsen Quotes. The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone. Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth. The pillars of truth and the pillars of freedom - they are the pillars of society. A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm. The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed. Biography of Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian Playwright. Henrik Ibsen (March 20, 1828–May 23, 1906) was a Norwegian playwright. Known as “the father of realism,” he is most notable for plays questioning the social mores of the time and featuring complex, yet assertive female characters. Fast Facts: Henrik Ibsen. Full Name: Henrik Johan Ibsen Known For: Norwegian playwright and director whose plays exposed the tensions of the rising middle class regarding morality, and featured complex female characters Born: March 20, 1828 in Skien, Norway Parents: Marichen and Died: May 23, 1906 in Kristiania, Norway Selected Works: Peer Gynt (1867), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), Hedda Gabler (1890). Spouse: Suzannah Thoresen Children: , prime minister of Norway. Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkedalen (out of wedlock). Early Life. Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828 to Marichen and Knud Ibsen in Skien, Norway. His family was part of the local merchant bourgeoisie and they lived in wealth until Knud Ibsen declared bankruptcy in 1835. His family’s fleeting financial fortunes had a lasting impression on his work, as several of his plays feature middle-class families dealing with financial hardship in a society that values morality and decorum. In 1843, upon being forced to leave school, Ibsen traveled to the town of Grimstad, where he started apprenticing in an apothecary’s shop. He had an affair with the apothecary’s maid and he fathered her child, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkedalen, in 1846. Ibsen accepted patrimony and paid maintenance for him for the next 14 years, though he never met the boy. Early Work (1850–1863) Catilina (1850) Kjempehøien, the Burial Mound (1850) Sancthansnatten (1852) Fru Inger til Osteraad (1854) Gildet Pa Solhoug (1855) Olaf Liljekrans (1857) The Vikings at Helgeland (1858) Love’s Comedy (1862) (1863) In 1850, under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme , Ibsen published his first play Catilina, based on Cicero’s speeches against the elected questor, who was conspiring to overthrow the government. Catiline to him was a troubled hero, and he felt drawn to him because, as he wrote in the prologue for the second edition of the play, “there are given few examples of historical persons, whose memory has been more entirely in the possession of their conquerors, than Catiline." Ibsen was inspired by the uprisings that Europe witnessed in the late 1840s, especially the Magyar uprising against the Habsburg empire. Also in 1850, Ibsen travelled to the capital Christiania (also known as Christiania, now Oslo) to sit for the national high school exams, but failed in Greek and arithmetic. That same year, his first play to be performed, The Burial Mound, was staged at the Christiania Theater. In 1851, violinist Ole Bull hired Ibsen for the Det Norske Theater in Bergen, where he began as an apprentice, eventually becoming director and resident playwright. While there, wrote and produced one play for the venue per year. He first gained recognition for Gildet paa Solhoug (1855), which was subsequently restaged in Christiania and published as a book and, in 1857, it received its first performance outside of Norway at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Sweden. That same year he was appointed artistic director at the Christiania Norske Theater. In 1858 he married Suzannah Thoresen, and a year later, his son Sigurd, future prime minister of Norway, was born. The family experienced a difficult financial situation. Ibsen published The Pretenders in 1863 with an initial run of 1.250 copies; the play was staged in 1864 at the Kristiania Theater, to great acclaim. Also in 1863, Ibsen applied for a state stipend, but was instead awarded a travel grant of 400 speciedaler (to make a comparison, in 1870 a male teacher would earn around 250 speciedaler a year) for a journey abroad. Ibsen left Norway in 1864, initially settling in Rome and exploring the south of Italy. Self-Imposed Exile and Success (1864–1882) Brand (1866) Peer Gynt (1867) Emperor and Galilean (1873) The League of Youth (1869) Digte, poems (1871) Pillars of Society (1877) A Doll’s House (1879) Ghosts (1881) An Enemy of the People (1882) Ibsen's luck turned when he left Norway. Published in 1866, his verse drama Brand, published by Gyldendal in Copenhagen, had three more print runs by the end of the year. Brand centers on a conflicted and idealist priest who has an “all or nothing” mentality and is obsessed with “doing the right thing”; its main themes are free will and consequence of choices. It premiered in Stockholm in 1867 and was the first play that established his reputation and secured him financial stability. That same year, he started working on his verse play Peer Gynt, which, through the trials and adventures of the eponymous Norwegian folk hero, expands on the themes laid out in Brand. Blending realism, folkloric fantasy and displaying then-unprecedented freedom in moving between time and space in a play, it chronicles the character’s travels from Norway all the way to Africa. The play was divisive among Scandinavian intellectuals: some criticized the lack of lyricism in his poetic language, while others praised it as a satire of Norwegian stereotypes. Peer Gynt premiered in Kristiania in 1876. In 1868, Ibsen moved to Dresden, where he remained for the next seven years. In 1873, he published Emperor and Galilean, which was his first work to be translated into English. Focusing on the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who was the last non-christian ruler of the Roman empire, Emperor and Galilean was, to Ibsen, his major work, even though critics and audiences didn't see it that way. After Dresden, Ibsen moved to Rome in 1878. The following year, while traveling to Amalfi, he wrote the majority of his new play A Doll’s House, published in 8,000 copies and premiering on December 21 at Det Kongelige Theater in Copenhagen. In this play, protagonist Nora walked out on her husband and children, which exposed the void of middle-class morality. In 1881, he travelled to Sorrento, where he wrote the majority of Ghosts, which, despite being published in December of that year in 10,000 copies, was met with harsh criticism as it openly featured venereal diseases and incest in a respectable middle-class family. It premiered in Chicago in 1882. Also in 1882, Ibsen published An Enemy of the People, which was staged at the Christiania Theater in 1883. In the play, an enemy attacked the entrenched belief in middle-class society, and the target was both the protagonist, an idealist doctor, and the small town government, which ostracized him instead of heeding his truth. Introspective Plays (1884–1906) The Wild Duck (1884) Rosmersholm (1886) The Lady from the Sea (1888) Hedda Gabler (1890) The Master Builder (1892) Little Eyolf (1894) John Gabriel Borkman (1896) When the Dead Awaken (1899) In his later works, the psychological conflicts Ibsen subjected his characters to went beyond the challenge of the mores of the time, having a more universal and interpersonal dimension. In 1884, he published The Wild Duck, which had its stage premiere in 1894. This is perhaps his most complex work, dealing with the reunion of two friends, Gregers, an idealist, and Hjalmar, a man hiding behind a façade of middle class happiness, including an illegitimate child and a sham marriage, which promptly crumbles. Hedda Gabler was published in 1890 and premiered the following year in Munich; German, English, and French translations became readily available. Its titular character is more complex than his other famous heroine, Nora Helmer ( A Doll’s House ). The aristocratic Hedda is newly married to the aspiring academic George Tesman; prior to the events of the play, they lived a life of luxury. The reappearance of George’s rival Eilert, a stereotypical intellectual who is brilliant but an alcoholic, throws their equilibrium into disarray, as he is a former lover of Hedda and a direct academic competitor of George. For this reason, Hedda tries to influence human fate and sabotage him. Critics such as Joseph Wood Krutch, who in 1953 wrote the article "Modernism in Modern Drama: A Definition and an Estimate," see Hedda as the first neurotic female character in literature, as her actions fall neither into a logical nor an insane pattern. Ibsen finally returned to Norway in 1891. In Kristiania, he befriended pianist Hildur Andersen, 36 years his junior, who is considered the model for Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder, published in December 1892. His last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), was published on December 22, 1899, with 12,000 copies. Death. After he turned 70 in March 1898, Ibsen’s health deteriorated. He suffered his first stroke in 1900, and he died in 1906 in his home in Kristiania. In his last years, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature three times, in 1902, 1903, and 1904. Literary Style and Themes. Ibsen was born in a wealthy family that experienced a significant upheaval of fortunes when he was seven, and this turn of events was a major influence in his work. The characters in his plays hide shameful financial difficulties, and secrecy also causes them to experience moral conflicts. His plays often challenged bourgeois morality. In A Doll’s House, Helmer’s primary concern is to maintain decorum and be in good standing among his peers, which is the main criticism he has for his wife Nora when she announces her intention to leave the family. In Ghosts, he portrays a respectable family’s vices, which are at their most apparent in the fact that the son, Oswald, inherited syphilis from his philandering father, and that he fell for the housemaid Regina, who is actually his illegitimate half-sister. In An Enemy of the People, we see truth clashing against convenient beliefs: Dr. Stockmann discovers that the water of the small town spa he works for is tainted, and wants to make the fact known, but the community and the local government shun him. Ibsen also sought to expose the hypocrisy of morality in his portrayal of suffering women, which was inspired by what his mother endured during the period of financial duress in the family. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, especially his works Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, was a major influence, too, even though he only started taking his works seriously after the publication of Brand, the first play that brought him critical acclaim and financial success. Peer Gynt , about a Norwegian folk hero, was informed by Kierkegaard’s work. Ibsen was Norwegian, yet he wrote his plays in Danish as that was the common language shared by Denmark and Norway during his lifetime. Legacy. Ibsen rewrote the rules of playwriting, opening the doors for plays to address or question morality, social issues, and universal conundrums, becoming works of art instead of sheer entertainment. Thanks to translators William Archer and Edmund Gosse, who championed Ibsen’s work for English-speaking audiences, plays like Ghosts delighted Tennessee Williams, and his realism influenced Chekhov and several English-speaking playwrights and writers, including James Joyce. Henrik Ibsen. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great Norwegian playwright whose middle-class tragedies include A Doll's House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler and An Enemy of the People. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great Norwegian playwright and poet, best known for his middle class tragedies such as The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People. These are set in a world where the middle class is dominant and explore the qualities of that life, its weaknesses and boundaries and the ways in which it takes away freedoms. It is the women who fare the worst in this society, something Ibsen explored in A Doll's House among others, a play that created a sensation with audiences shocked to watch a woman break free of her bourgeois family life to find her destiny. He explored dark secrets such as incest and, in Ghosts, hereditary syphilis, which attracted the censors. He gave actresses parts they had rarely had before, and audiences plays that, after Shakespeare, became the most performed in the world. Tore Rem Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr Professor of English and Theatre Studies and Tutorial Fellow, St Catherine's College at the University of Oxford. Dinah Birch Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Cultural Engagement at the University of Liverpool. Henrik Ibsen. Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in Skien, Norway. In 1862, he was exiled to Italy, where he wrote the tragedy Brand . In 1868, Ibsen moved to Germany, where he wrote one of his most famous works: the play A Doll's House . In 1890, he wrote Hedda Gabler , creating one of theater's most notorious characters . By 1891, Ibsen had returned to Norway a literary hero. He died on May 23, 1906, in Oslo, Norway. Childhood. As a child, Ibsen showed little sign of the theatrical genius he would become. He grew up in the small Norwegian coastal town of Skien as the oldest of five children born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen. His father was a successful merchant and his mother painted, played the piano and loved to go to the theater. Ibsen himself expressed an interest in becoming an artist as well. The family was thrown into poverty when Ibsen was 8 because of problems with his father's business. Nearly all traces of their previous affluence had to be sold off to cover debts, and the family moved to a rundown farm near town. There, Ibsen spent much of his time reading, painting and performing magic tricks. At 15, Ibsen stopped school and went to work. He landed a position as an apprentice in an apothecary in Grimstad. Ibsen worked there for six years, using his limited free time to write poetry and paint. In 1849, he wrote his first play Catilina , a drama written in verse modeled after one of his great influences, William Shakespeare. Early Works. Ibsen moved to Christiania (later known as Oslo) in 1850 to prepare for university examinations to study at the University of Christiania. Living in the capital, he made friends with other writers and artistic types. One of these friends, Ole Schulerud, paid for the publication of Ibsen's first play Catilina , which failed to get much notice. The following year, Ibsen had a fateful encounter with violinist and theater manager Ole Bull. Bull liked Ibsen and offered him a job as a writer and manager for the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. The position proved to be an intense tutorial in all things theatrical and even included traveling abroad to learn more about his craft. In 1857, Ibsen returned to Christiania to run another theater there. This proved to be a frustrating venture for him, with others claiming that he mismanaged the theater and calling for his ouster. Despite his difficulties, Ibsen found time to write Love's Comedy , a satirical look at marriage, in 1862. Writing in Exile. Ibsen left Norway in 1862, eventually settling in Italy for a time. There he wrote Brand , a five-act tragedy about a clergyman whose feverish devotion to his faith costs him his family and ultimately his life in 1865. The play made him famous in Scandinavia. Two years later, Ibsen created one of his masterworks, Peer Gynt . A modern take on Greek epics of the past, the verse play follows the title character on a quest. In 1868, Ibsen moved to Germany. During his time there, he saw his social drama The Pillars of Society first performed in Munich. The play helped launch his career and was soon followed up by one of his most famous works, A Doll's House . This 1879 play set tongues a-wagging throughout Europe for exploration of Nora's struggle with the traditional roles of wife and mother and her own need for self-exploration. Once again, Ibsen had questioned the accepted social practices of the times, surprising his audiences and stirring up debate. Around this time, he returned to Rome. His next work, 1881's Ghosts, stirred up even more controversy by tackling such topics as incest and venereal disease. The outcry was so strong that the play wasn't performed widely until two years later. His next work, An Enemy of the People , showed one man in conflict with his community. Some critics say it was Ibsen's response to the backlash he received for Ghosts. Ibsen wrote The Lady From the Sea (1888) and then soon headed back to Norway, where he would spend the remainder of his years. One of his most famous works was to follow, in Hedda Gabler . With Hedda Gabler (1890), Ibsen created one of the theater's most notorious characters. Hedda, a general's daughter, is a newlywed who has come to loathe her scholarly husband, yet she destroys a former love who stands in her husband's way academically. The character has sometimes been called the female Hamlet, after Shakespeare's famous tragic figure. Back to Norway. In 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway as a literary hero. He may have left as a frustrated artist, but he came back as internationally known playwright. For much of his life, Ibsen had lived an almost reclusive existence. But he seemed to thrive in the spotlight in his later years, becoming a tourist attraction of sorts in Christiania. He also enjoyed the events held in his honor in 1898 to mark his seventieth birthday. His later works seem to have a more self-reflective quality with mature lead characters looking back and living with the consequences of their earlier life choices. And each drama seems to end on a dark note. The first play written after his return to Norway was The Master Builder . The title character encounters a woman from his past who encourages him to make good on a promise. In When We Dead Awaken , written in 1899, an old sculptor runs into one of his former models and tries to recapture his lost creative spark. It proved to be his final play. Final Years. In 1900, Ibsen had a series of strokes that left him unable to write. He managed to live for several more years, but he was not fully present during much of this time. Ibsen died on May 23, 1906. His last words were "To the contrary!" in Norwegian. Considered a literary titan at the time of his passing, he received a state funeral from the Norwegian government. While Ibsen may be gone, his work continues to be performed around the world. Peer Gynt , A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler are the most widely produced plays today. Actresses, such as Gillian Anderson and Cate Blanchett, have taken on Ibsen's Nora and Hedda Gabler characters, which are considered to be two of the most demanding theatrical roles ever. In addition to his plays, Ibsen also wrote around 300 poems. Ibsen's works have held up over the years because he tapped into universal themes and explored the human condition in a way unlike any of those before him. Author James Joyce once wrote that Ibsen "has provoked more discussion and criticism that of any other living man." To this day, his plays continue to challenge audiences. Personal Life. Unlike many other writers and poets, Ibsen had a long and seemingly happy marriage to Suzannah Daae Thoresen. The couple wed in 1858 and welcomed their only child, son Sigurd, the following year. Ibsen also had a son from an earlier relationship. He had fathered a child with a maid in 1846 while working as an apprentice. While he provided some financial support, Ibsen never met the boy. Fact Check. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! 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. 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 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. 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 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.