By Ethan Doskey
An unlikely industry mover and shaker, Henrik Ibsen was born into a Norwegian mercantile family that was rapidly losing its riches, leaving Ibsen with no formal education past the age of 15. These circumstances were not the only setbacks in his early life. When he began working as an apothecary's apprentice, he soon had an illegitimate son with a much older housemaid. He paid child support until the child was grown, but Ibsen never met him. The next chapters of his life were defined by rapid changes of scenery. He tried to get into the University in Christiana, but failed the math and Greek sections of the entrance exam. He became friends with painter Edvard Munch. And for a short period of time he was associated with a worker’s rights and anarchist movement which he abandoned in fear of being arrested like his roommate, Theodore Abildgaard.
In 1851, Ibsen stumbled upon the Den Nationale Scene in Bergen, Norway, one of the few theatres in a country with zero theatrical history at the time. Ibsen himself had no experience as a theatre maker. His first exposure to Shakespeare was in Copenhagen as part of a mandatory trip funded by the Den Nationale Scene. Although he had only written poetry before, Ibsen managed to become a writer-in-residence with two plays under his belt — Catilina, a story published under his pseudonym, “Brynjolf Bjarme,” and criticized for centering around a Roman protagonist, not a Norwegian one, and Burial Ground, based on Nordic Viking traditions. Both were written in verse and received little attention. Despite his tribulations, Christiania Norwegian Theatre hired him in 1857 as an artistic director, which he led until 1862 when he bankrupted the company. In Ibsen’s young adult life, his debts greatly depressed him and crippled his career.
Thankfully, he married Suzannah Thoreson in 1858 and had one son with her. Suzannah inspired Ibsen’s thoughts on marriage and gender dynamics, topics he would explore in most of his significant works. Ibsen felt that rather than merely live together, husband and wife should live as equals, free to become their own human beings. Shortly after his marriage, the thirteen sources of his debts began suing him. However, Ibsen miracuously found enough grants to narrowly escape debtors’ prison.
Ibsen fled with his family to Rome in a self-imposed exile. One of the grants awarded by the Norwegian government for a later play, Brand, sustained him as a playwright for the purposes of spreading Norwegian nationalism. Ibsen fought an uphill battle in his career in Europe, though. He wrote solely in Norwegian at a time when only 1.4 million people spoke the language. Audiences outside of Norway required translations to perform his work.
After receiving some attention with Peer Gynt, Ibsen made a radical switch in style to writing his plays in prose and about social issues beginning with his play, The Pillars of Society in 1877. This was new. Theatre in Europe before Ibsen had not changed since the late 1770s and was defined by the comedy of manners movement — “well-made plays” that parodied upper class behavior written in verse. Ibsen was the first significant playwright to publish new work in a hundred years during an epoch where novels captivated the literate masses. Now, Ibsen hit his stride by creating new works which seriously questioned the societal standards of his time, a movement that would later be called “modernism.” Perhaps his most significant play, A Doll’s House, stirred up debate around Europe, giving Ibsen a name in theatre.
Before dying in 1906 at the age of 78, Henrik Ibsen had written nearly 30 plays and had begun a movement that would define a century. With other radical works such as Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, Ibsen embraced controversy and started important discussions on women’s rights, intentionally or not. Despite major setbacks in his young adult life and the challenges brought by writing in Norwegian, Ibsen inspired a new generation of playwrights that would invigorate the theatre world by building on the groundwork he laid for them. Ibsen invented what we come to expect from plays today – intellectual works that reflect the world and issues around us, leaving us with questions to answer for ourselves.
Comments