Henrik
Ibsen's ancestors were sea captains and businessmen, while his father was a to-well-do
merchant, dealing chiefly in hobble. Ibsen was born in 1828 in Skien, a town in
the south of Norway. Three brothers and a sister were born after him, but
Henrik was the only member of his family to show promise. When he was eight
years old, his father's business failed and the family retired to a country
house. Ibsen bitterly recalled how their friends, eager to eat and drink as
guests of the prosperous merchant, forsake all connections with the Ibsens when
they lost their financial standing.
Although the young Ibsen showed talent
as a painter, his family was too poor to allow him to study art. When he was
fifteen, his father sent him to Grimstad, a small provincial town south of
Skien. Here he became an apothecary's trainee, the next best thing to medicine.
In the first three years of his Grimstad life, Ibsen lived entirely alone. Too
uncommunicative to make friends and too poor to seek entertainments, he read rapaciously,
particularly in contemporary poetry and in theology. Eventually he was the
center of a small circle of young men, and during this time began to write
poetry.
After
six dark years in the hostile atmosphere of this provincial Norwegian village,
Ibsen, by extreme economy and privation, had saved enough money to leave for
the capital, Christiania (Oslo). Hoping to study at the university, he enrolled
in a "student factory," a popular name given to an irregular school
which coached students for the entrance examinations. Here Ibsen first met his
lifelong rival and contemporary, Björnstjerne Björnson, who was to be known in
the future, along with Ibsen, as a national poet of Norway.
At this period of Ibsen's youth, Norway
experienced a nationalist arousing. The new literary generation, after four
hundred years of Danish rule (1397–1818), sought after to revitalize the
glories of Norwegian history and medieval literature. The middle age was glorified
as well because the romantic movements were in full swing throughout Europe.
Thus, when Ole Bull, the great violinist, founded a Norse theater at Bergen,
the project met with keen endorsement from all the youthful idealists raring to
go to destabilize the influence of Danish culture.
At
a benefit performance to raise money for the new venture, Ibsen presented the
prologue — a poem glorifying Norway's past — which moved Ole Bull to appoint
him theater poet and stage manager of the Bergen Theater. This position
launched Ibsen on his dramatic career. Staging more than 150 plays, including
works by Shakespeare and the French dramatist Scribe, Ibsen gained as much
practical experience in stagecraft as that possessed by Shakespeare and
Molière. In this same year, the twenty-eight year old Ibsen became engaged to
Susannah Thoresen, a girl of strong personality and sovereign judgment, and the
marriage took place two years later.
Encouraged by the success of Ole Bull's
Norse theater in Bergen, enthusiasts of nationalist poetry in the capital also
founded a new theater in direct competition with the conservative,
Danish-influenced Christiania Theater. Asked to direct this new venture,
Ibsen's promised salary was twice the amount he received at Bergen, about six
hundred specie dollars.
Returning
to the capital with a new play, The Vikings at Helgeland, Ibsen first submitted the
manuscript to the old Christiania Theater where he would be free to collect
royalties. At first the Danish director accepted the piece, but he returned it
a few months later with a flimsy excuse. This gratuitous insult sparked a hot
controversy between Ibsen, Björnson, and their followers on the one hand, and
the adherents of the Danish influence on the other. After five years of public
controversy, the conservative director was forced to resign, while The
Vikings became one of the
chief pieces performed under the theater's new management. Ibsen was
disappointed to find that his poetic ideals were misunderstood by his
gregarious contemporaries. In a poem, "On the Heights," he expressed
the view that a man who wishes to devote himself to the arts must sacrifice the
usual pleasures of life; a poet must view life apart in order to find in it
models for his work.
Ibsen suffered great depression during this
part of his life. The varied responsibilities of his job allowed him no chance
for his own creative work. In addition, the theater was doing so badly that his
salary was severely reduced. Besides neglecting his work, he published no play
from 1857 until Love's Comedy in 1862. This new anti-romantic
satire received hostile reviews although it shows a maturing talent and the
bold viewpoint which characterizes his later works. When the theater finally
declared bankruptcy, Ibsen's despair was complete. However, Ibsen's fortunes
changed in the following year when The Pretenders, a play glorifying the Norse
heroes of the past, won an enthusiastic reception from both audience and
reviewers. As a result of this success, the government awarded Ibsen a
travelling scholarship to bring him in contact with the cultural trends in the
rest of Europe.
Retiring
with his family to a little town in the hills, Ibsen wrote with an inspired
pen. Affected by the events of the Prusso-Danish war over Schleswig-Holstein,
his interests turning from the esthetic to the ethical, Ibsen produced the
colossal Brand. Considered "the most stirring event in Norway's
literary history of the nineteenth century," this drama won nationwide
fame for its composer. The protagonist of the play, a mystical clergyman, is a
courageous idealist of noble stature whose lack of love or humanity destroys
his own wife and child in an uncompromising commitment to his ethical
principles.
Published
in the following year, Peer Gynt established
Ibsen's international fame. This enthusiastic, fantasy-filled drama is the direct
opposite of Brand. In 1867, the king awarded
Ibsen for his success. Almost completely self-inspired, Ibsen was an atypical
genius who vital no outside influence for his work. Ibsen likes to keep himself
as much as possible. Constantly working and reworking his dramas throughout
each two year period, seldom exposing, even to his family, the nature of his
current writing, he overenthusiastically pursue his art.
Callous
self-analysis was one of his life principles. In each play he expresses this
constant introspection, always underscoring a thesis based on egocentric. In
the novel entitled ‘Emperor’ and ‘Galilean?’ Ibsen
himself once wrote in a poem that "to live is to fight with trolls in
heart and brain. To be a poet is to pronounce a final judgment upon
oneself." Ibsen died in 1906. His tombstone, inscribed only with a hammer,
the miner's symbol, alludes to a poem Ibsen wrote as a youth. Ending with
"Break me the way, you heavy hammer”, “To the deepest bottom of my
heart," the verse is a brief statement of the passion of Ibsen's personal idea
and of his dramatic art.
One of his famous novels " A Doll House".
Henrik Ibsen cognate.
