Henrik Ibsen’s ancestors were sea captains and businessmen, while his father was a well-to-do merchant, dealing chiefly in lumber. 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 dine and drink as guests of the affluent merchant, forsook 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; neither could they afford to train him for his chosen profession in medicine. When he was fifteen, his father sent him to Grimstad, a small provincial town south of Skien. Here he became an apothecary’s apprentice, 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 voraciously, 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.
Learning Latin in order to prepare for the university, Ibsen studied Cicero and became deeply interested in the character of Catiline, the agitator and revolutionary who was eventually assassinated. His first play, a historical drama in verse, was an attempt to explain this elusive character. Catiline, however, when published at the private expense of one enthusiastic friend, received no public notice and few copies were sold.
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, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, who was to be known in the future, along with Ibsen, as a national poet of Norway. Found deficient in two subjects, Ibsen failed to enter the university. At this time as well, Catiline was rejected by the Christiania theater, but his The Warrior’s Barrow was accepted and performed three times in 1850.
At this period of Ibsen’s youth, Norway experienced a nationalist awakening. The new literary generation, after four hundred years of Danish rule (1397–1818), sought to revive the glories of Norwegian history and medieval literature. The middle ages were glorified as well because the romantic movement was in full swing throughout Europe. Thus, when Ole Bull, the great violinist, founded a Norse theater at Bergen, the project met with enthusiastic approval from all the youthful idealists eager to subvert 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 Moliere. In addition to his managerial position, the poet was obliged to produce one original play a year. Although his The Warrior’s Barrow and St. John’s Night met with failure, the critics approved of Lady Inger of Ostraat (1855) and The Feast at Solhaug (1856). In this same year, the twenty-eight year old Ibsen became engaged to Susannah Thoresen, a girl of strong personality and independent 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, Bjornson, 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.
Throughout these early years, the relationship between Ibsen and Bjornson was very friendly. Bjornson became godfather when the Ibsens’ son, Sigurd, was born in 1859; when the dramatist was in serious financial straits, Bjornson made every effort to raise money for him. The two men also shared the same circle of friends at this time, although 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. Like Captain Alving, he became a victim of that “second-rate town which had no joys to offer — only dissipations,” and spent much time in barrooms. Bjornson, meanwhile, was a successful and already famous poet to whom the government awarded an annual grant of four hundred dollars to devote himself exclusively to poetic works. 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.
Visiting Rome, Ibsen viewed for the first time the great art masterpieces of the classical and renaissance periods. In the warm, sunny climate of Italy, Ibsen felt intoxicated with his freedom from the stultifying atmosphere of Norwegian provincialism. 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 exuberant, fantasy-filled drama is the antithesis of Brand. The spoiled darling of a weak mother and rich father, Peer lives according to the principle of “to thyself — enough.” Rather than overcoming obstacles, he goes “roundabout” and avoids facing problems. Unlike Brand, Peer never commits himself to principles unless they are to his personal benefit. The play is full of symbolic allusions and rich lyrical poetry. In 1867, the king decorated Ibsen for his achievement.
After four years in Italy, Ibsen settled down to his lifework, first in Dresden and then in Munich. His biography from this point on is more or less uneventful. Producing a new play every two years, Ibsen’s dramatic powers increased and his social criticism ripened. Along with Bjornson, he was considered Norway’s greatest poet, but he maintained primacy as a dramatist. Honors heaped upon him and with a prosperous income, Ibsen appeared as a frock-coated and respectable middle class individual.
Almost entirely self-inspired, Ibsen was a rare genius who required no outside influence for his work. Unlike Bjornson, who lectured, made frequent public appearances, and wrote novels and plays as well as poems, Ibsen kept to himself as much as possible. Constantly working and reworking his dramas throughout each two year period, rarely divulging, even to his family, the nature of his current writing, he single-mindedly pursued his art. Just as he gave up painting in his youth for writing poetry and drama, he now stopped composing poems, eventually relinquishing even the verse form of his earlier plays for the prose of the later works.
Harsh self-analysis was one of his life principles. In each play he expresses this constant introspection, always underscoring a thesis based on self-seeking. In Emperor and Galilean, for example, Julian fails to establish the “first empire” of pagan sensuality, then casts aside the “second empire” of Christian self-abnegation. As the hero expires, he envisions a “third empire,” where, in the words of the biographer Zucker, “men were to find God not on Mount Olympus nor on Calvary but in their own souls, wills, and senses.” 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.”
The Norwegian commentator Francis Bull (1887–1974) sums up Ibsen’s personal search:
“More deeply than ordinary men, Ibsen was split in two — a great genius and a shy and timid little philistine. In daily life he quite often did not come up to his own heroic ideals and revolutionary theories, but listened to the troll voices of narrow-minded egotism and compromise — and then, afterwards, the genius in him arose, a judge without mercy. This ever-recurring fight meant to him lifelong suffering; but it was this drama constantly going on in his own soul that made him a great dramatist and compelled him again and again to undertake a penetrating self-analysis.”
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 succinct statement of the intensity of Ibsen’s personal vision and of his dramatic art.
