Ibsen was born in 1828, the same year as Tolstoy, at Skien, a small town a little over 100 kilometers southwest of Oslo. His mother had artistic interests and his father was a prosperous merchant whose fortunes reversed dramatically before Ibsen was ten. His youth and young manhood is a tale of poverty, hardship, and loneliness. At fifteen, he was apprenticed to a pharmacist at Grimstad. He worked long hours and stole from his sleep to study for the entrance exams at the University of Christiania (now Oslo), which, performing poorly in Greek and mathematics, he nevertheless failed. He had an illegitimate son with a servant girl in 1846. There is no evidence indicating Ibsen ever met the boy, though he helped to support him for fourteen years.
By 1850, when Ibsen moved to Christiania, he was writing satirical sketches, poems, and plays. They are of interest now only because he wrote them. He came to the attention of Ole Bull, who hired him to work at Den Nationale Scene, a small theatre in Bergen where, like Shakespeare before him, he acquired a practical education in the theatrical arts. He remained in Bergen till 1856, when he returned to Christiania to become the artistic director of the new Norwegian Theatre, and when after a couple years that theatre went bankrupt he caught on at the Christiania Theatre. The many plays he completed during these years found no audience and history has not reversed the judgment of his contemporaries. A series of four dramas, for instance, treated Norwegian history and folklore. Probably there was rough weather and trolls but you would have to read them to know for sure.
Meanwhile Ibsen had in 1858 married Suzannah Thoresen. Their only child, Sigurd, was born the next year. There is at the center of most of Ibsen's great plays a problematic or sham marriage, so it is natural to speculate about his own, the more so because after he was famous he formed apparently intimate associations with a series of much younger women. But Suzannah, the stepchild of a novelist, appears to have been through the years a reliable support and source of stability. She died in 1914, eight years after her husband.
Ibsen left Norway in 1864 and, excepting a couple brief visits, did not return until 1891. His attitude toward Norway appears to have resembled Joyce's toward Ireland: he couldn't stand it, found it intolerably stuffy, and took his inspiration from it. (Joyce, by the way, revered Ibsen, taught himself Norwegian in order to be able to correspond, and, in his first published work, glowingly reviewed When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen's last dramatic work, in the Fortnightly Review of April 1, 1900.) In nomadic exile, mostly in Italy and Germany, and almost forty years old, Ibsen soon began producing the plays on which his reputation as the world's second greatest dramatist rest. Here is the roster: Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), then, turning in a new direction, Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).
The best critical study is probably still George Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The standard, accepted summary of Ibsen's life's work is that he invented the tightly plotted drama of social realism. True, but it sounds like something in a half-forged college essay, and does not explain, for example, Joyce's adulation. Ibsen's great overlooked theme, in my estimation, concerns self-delusion: the power of many of the plays derives largely from the way pretensions and "life's lie"--the story people tell themselves about themselves in order to live contentedly--is stripped away so that both audience and character finally contemplate their naked selves. The American dramatist O'Neill said something that summarizes the desolating effect of the great Ibsen plays--"a life of illusion is unpardonable, but a life without illusion is unbearable."
Ibsen developed mental illness in his final years and died, in Christiania, in 1906.
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