HENRIK IBSEN- PLAYWRIGHT

HENRIK IBSEN:

Ibsen was born in 1828, into a wealthy family due to his mother’s inherited wealth and his father’s successful merchant business. When Ibsen was four, the family moved into a larger house and held lavish parties. This initial period of comfort, was punctuated by tragedy. Ibsen’s elder brother had died several weeks after his own birth. He was born into a house that was suffering a loss; in addition, the family enjoyment soon disappeared. By the time Ibsen was six the family was bankrupt. The pain of loss and the anxiety created by the threat of poverty run as strong themes through A Doll’s House. 

Ibsen became an unhappy child, shutting himself up in a disused pantry away from his siblings – drawing caricatures of them and bursting into rages if they interfered with his papers or his toy theatre. He initially wanted to be a doctor however a lack of family money meant he was only able to become apprentice to an apothecary in Grimstad. He spent six unhappy years there. He had no privacy during this time, being forced to share his lodgings with the children of his boss. While he was there, he fathered an illegitimate child by a woman ten years older than him. He would go on to be financially responsible for this child even through his most poverty-stricken years. 

His position as the ‘resident poet’ at the Bergen Theatre turned out to be more of a stage management job, but at least Ibsen was working in the world of theatre, as he wished. He continued to write plays through his employment. He was soon offered a job at the Norwegian National Theatre, and he experienced a brief period of some comfort as they paid him twice the wage the Bergen Theatre had paid. However, when the theatre – which had established itself  due to a lack of good Norwegian material, Ibsen was let go. Ibsen was desperately poor once again and now had a wife and a four-year-old son to support. 

It was at this time that he finally secured a bursary for travel, heading first to Denmark. Ibsen’s patriotism became complicated by this trip to Copenhagen in 1864 as the Danes were fighting a war with Prussia. He was so moved by the courage of the Danish fighters that he wrote many poems and articles to try to motivate the rest of Scandinavia to become Denmark’s allies in their struggle. Norway did nothing, and, as a result, the Danes were defeated. Ibsen was so ashamed by his countrymen that he swore never to return to Norway. 

This distance from his homeland offered Ibsen critical distance from his native culture and made him more aggressively Norwegian in his work. Perhaps, now living in Rome, his cultural identity became more potent as he marked his difference from those around him. The first play he wrote while living in Rome abandoned a romantic verse style influenced by the song and legend of his own country, and instead was written in a strong Norwegian vernacular and coined a nationalistic spelling.

Ibsen was at one of his poorest moments when living in Rome – at this time the Norwegian National Theatre wrote to offer him the post of director which would have solved all of his family’s financial worries. However, his principles were stronger than his fear of poverty. Ibsen turned down the offer on the basis that being in Norway would have restricted him creatively. 

While in Rome, in 1867, Ibsen wrote Brand and he finally achieved financial success. This play afforded him a state pension and he could escape the anxiety of poverty that had followed him his whole life – the concern did, however, live on in his work.