About Henrik Ibsen
 Norwegian playwright and luminary of the 19th-century Norwegian literature. Ibsen is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern prose drama. He moved away from the Romantic style, unmasking the romantic hero, and brought the problems and ideas of the day onto his stage.
Henrik Ibsen was born in Skien, a tiny coastal town. His father was a prosperous merchant, whose financial failure changed the family's social position. Poverty interrupted Ibsen's education and it gave Ibsen a strong distrust of society. At the age of 16 he was for a time apprenticed to a pharmacist in Grimstad. In 1846 he was compelled to support an illegitimate child born to a servant girl. In 1848 a revolution swept Europe and Ibsen adopted the new ideas of personal freedom.
In 1850 Ibsen moved to Christiania (now Oslo). He attended Heltberg's 'student factory' for university candidates, and occasionally earned from his journalistic writings. In the same year he wrote two plays, 'Catilina', a tragedy, which reflected the atmosphere of the revolutionary year of 1848, and 'The Burial Mound'. Ibsen hoped to become a physician but after failing university entrance examinations, he was appointed in 1851 as 'stage poet' of Den Nationale Scene, a small theater in Bergen. He wrote there four plays based on Norwegian folklore and history, notably 'Lady Inger of Ostrat' (1855), dealing with the liberation of medieval Norway. In 1852 his theater sent him on a study tour to Denmark and Germany.
Ibsen returned in 1857 to Christiania to become artistic director of the new Norwegian (Norske) Theatre. In 1858 he married Suzannah Thoresen, the stepchild of the novelist Magdalene Thoresen. Their only child, Sigurd, was born next year. After many productions, the theater went bankrupt, and Ibsen was appointed to the Christiania Theatre. To this period belong 'The Vikings of Helgoland' (1858) and 'The Pretenders' (1864), both historical sagas, and 'Love's Comedy' (1862), a satire. Several of Ibsen's plays failed to attract audience and these public humiliations became a burden for him.
In 1864 Ibsen received an award for foreign travel from the government, and also had financial help from Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. He left Norway for Italy in April, and traveled abroad for the next 27 years, returning to Norway only for brief visits. During this time, when he lived in Rome, Munich and Dresden, Ibsen wrote most of his best-known works, among others 'Brand' (1866), a symbolic tragedy about a priest, who follows his high principles. Its theme, an individual with his God-given mission pitted against society, reflected deeply the feelings of young liberals. Brand's firm belief is "No compromise!" and at the end he dies, in an avalache. 'Peer Gynt' (1867) was a satiric fantasy about a boastful egoist, irresponsible Peer, a figure from Norwegian folklore. Peer is saved by the love of a woman, Solveig. In both of these works the romantic hero is destroyed and their 'ideal demands' are crushed. No doubt the themes also rose from Ibsen's disillusionment with his countrymen. In 1865 he wrote to Björnson: "If I were to tell at this moment what has been the chief result of my stay abroad, I should say that it consisted in my having driven out of myself the aestheticism which had a great power over me - an isolated aestheticism with a claim to independent existence. Aestheticism of this kind seem to me now as a great curse to poetry as theology is to religion."
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