Ibsen turned middle-class secrets into modern drama
Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), born into the merchant elite of Skien, is widely called the foremost playwright of the nineteenth century. Freud ranked him with Shakespeare and Sophocles, and Shaw claimed he had overtaken Shakespeare. His plays peeled back respectable family façades, and his own family supplied much of the material.
Ibsen made his name as a theatre director in Norway in the 1850s and broke through internationally in the 1860s with Brand and the surreal verse drama Peer Gynt. After that he dropped verse for realistic prose. From 1864 he spent 27 years abroad, mostly in Rome, Dresden and Munich, before settling in Christiania in 1891. Yet most of his plays are set in Norway, often in bourgeois towns that recall Skien. Critics usually pick The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm as his best, though Ibsen himself thought Emperor and Galilean his masterpiece.
Many contemporaries found the later plays scandalous, because theatre was expected to model upright family life and Ibsen showed what went on behind the curtains. He influenced Shaw, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, wrote in Dano-Norwegian for the Danish publisher Gyldendal, and is often described as Norway's most famous person abroad. His son Sigurd became prime minister.
His roots lay in the Paus clan, families that had held wealth and power in Telemark since the 1500s. His parents, Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, grew up so closely that they were called near-siblings; older scholars thought this near-incestuous match fascinated him and surfaced in Rosmersholm, but historian Jørgen Haave notes such unions were common among the Skien elite. Childhood acquaintances remembered a boy spoiled by his father, happiest creating alone with a model theatre, and inclined to lord it over other children.
Early biographers such as Henrik Jæger told a rags-from-riches story: a ruined, drunken, tyrannical father and a family in freefall, read as the key to the ruin and hidden guilt in the plays. The fuller picture is milder. Money troubles did force the sale of the town house in 1835, but at the farm of Venstøp the family still kept four servants and threw lavish parties, and Knud later leaned on his prosperous half-brothers.
Source: Henrik Ibsen
