Henrik Ibsen

Who Was Henrik Ibsen?

Henrik Ibsen was the father of modern drama — the Norwegian playwright whose work in the second half of the nineteenth century transformed the theater of the Western world from a vehicle of entertainment and melodrama into a medium capable of sustained moral and psychological inquiry. Born in Skien, Norway, to a prosperous family that fell into poverty during his childhood, he left home at fifteen to work as an apothecary’s apprentice and began writing plays in his early twenties. After years of struggle and obscurity in Norway, he went into voluntary exile in Italy and Germany in 1864, where he spent most of the next twenty-seven years, writing the plays that would make him the most discussed and most controversial dramatist of his age.

His major plays — A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892) — constitute one of the most remarkable bodies of dramatic work in any language. They introduced to the stage the discussion of subjects — hereditary disease, marital unhappiness, the hypocrisy of respectable society, the psychology of self-deception — that the theater had previously avoided, and they did so with a formal precision and a psychological depth that made them simultaneously scandalous and inescapable.

Ibsen’s influence on subsequent drama is almost impossible to overstate. Shaw, O’Neill, Miller, Chekhov, Strindberg — every major playwright of the twentieth century wrote in his shadow, either absorbing his method or reacting against it. He is significant for TLA because his plays are organized around the question of truth — specifically, the question of what happens when the comfortable lies that sustain social life are exposed, and whether human beings can bear to live without them.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• A Doll's House — 1879
• Ghosts — 1881
• An Enemy of the People — 1882
• The Wild Duck — 1884
• Hedda Gabler — 1890
• The Master Builder — 1892
• When We Dead Awaken — 1899