Ibsen Biography - Apuntes de Teatro

Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906

from Literature Online biography

Published in Cambridge, 2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning

Company)

In his own time, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was famous for his scandalous plots, his willingness to

handle subjects as controversial as divorce, incest, women's rights and venereal disease. His

contemporary Halvdan Koht wrote that Ibsen's plays 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life'; they

'pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics'. Today, although his plays remain fiercely

polemical, Ibsen is usually venerated as a master psychologist, a writer whose grasp of character

interaction makes him the undisputed father of modern drama, the first playwright to explore and expose

his protagonists' inner thoughts. Starting with Brand in 1866 and culminating with the autobiographical

masterpiece When We Dead Awaken in 1899, he expertly dramatizes the psychological turbulence of his

heroes and heroines as they try to reconcile their desires with the ordinances of civilized society. All of

Ibsen's mature plays circle around this theme. Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt, John Gabriel Borkman and all of

his other characters strive to remain true to themselves. They are threatened by external pressures

(morality, religion, law and order). They are terrorized by internal forces (inherited characteristics, guilt).

The question is always the same: are they cowards or not? Ibsen redefines courage so that it comes to

apply to anyone who has the audacity to declare, like Nora in A Doll's House: 'I must think things out for

myself, and try to find my own answer.' This insistance on individualism and a concomitant belief in the

difficulty of self-realisation had a massive influence on nineteenth-century culture and society.

Of course, Ibsen retained some old-fashioned devices and ideas. All of his plays have melodramatic

elements (the power of scandal, the appeal of fallen women, the return of past lovers, the dramatic

potential of secrets and revelations). But, all in all, they embrace the contradictory nature of nineteenth-

century Europe. They move the unstable and angst-ridden self to the centre of modern drama. Like Zola,

Ibsen attacks the rottenness of bourgeois society. Like Chekhov, he patents a kind of domestic

tragicomedy. But arguably, Ibsen's experiments with character and consciousness had a wider influence,

even if Zola and Chekhov are now acknowledged to be greater writers. An 18-year-old James Joyce

called Ibsen a 'great genius' who has 'provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any other living

man'. One of Bernard Shaw's first books was The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in which he asserted that A

Doll's House 'conquered Europe and founded a new school of dramatic art'. Henry James wrote that

Hedda Gabler was 'saturated, above all, with a sense of the infinitude of character, finding that an

endless romance and a perpetual challenge'. Ibsen purged nineteenth-century theatre of its sentimentality

and artificiality. He relieved theatre of its traditional duty to entertain, an aspect of his work which would

have a major impact on twentieth-century drama, particularly on the work of Artaud, Brecht and Ionesco.

He redefined the notion of tragedy, creating characters with which a modern audience could identify. He

also abandoned any conception of good and evil, making all of his protagonists flawed and ambivalent

individuals with clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. In this way, he was the least political of

writers, protesting that ideals and movements simplified and limited human activity. He wished to

dramatize the parts of consciousness that politics could not address or articulate. In 1898, he was asked to

speak to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights. He replied: 'I have never written any play to

further a social purpose. I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people

seem inclined to believe.' He used politics to examine psychological crisis, not the other way around.

Ibsen was born in 1828 in Skien, a lumbering town in Norway. When Ibsen was young, his parents were

comparatively wealthy: his father was a landowner and businessman. However, in 1834, his father's

business failed, leaving him a bitter and litigious old man. Many of Ibsen's plays would investigate the

effects of poverty on family units. Hedda Gabler can't bear to be poor and makes her husband run up

debts. In Ghosts, Mrs Alving desperately tries to keep up a facade of affluence and gentility. In Peer

Gynt, the hero has to try to live up to his father's name and restore the family fortunes. The same effect is

discernable in the writings of Charles Dickens, a writer whose father also became a bankrupt. Like

Dickens, Ibsen seems to be motivated by a terror of impoverishment and a vestigial sense of family

honour. His plays dramatize the psychological implications of survival, struggle and defiance.

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Ibsen, Henrik, 1828- 1906 from Literature Online biography Published in Cambridge, 2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company) Copyright © 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved. In his own time, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was famous for his scandalous plots, his willingness to handle subjects as controversial as divorce, incest, women's rights and venereal disease. His contemporary Halvdan Koht wrote that Ibsen's plays 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life'; they 'pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics'. Today, although his plays remain fiercely polemical, Ibsen is usually venerated as a master psychologist, a writer whose grasp of character interaction makes him the undisputed father of modern drama, the first playwright to explore and expose his protagonists' inner thoughts. Starting with Brand in 1866 and culminating with the autobiographical masterpiece When We Dead Awaken in 1899, he expertly dramatizes the psychological turbulence of his heroes and heroines as they try to reconcile their desires with the ordinances of civilized society. All of Ibsen's mature plays circle around this theme. Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt, John Gabriel Borkman and all of his other characters strive to remain true to themselves. They are threatened by external pressures (morality, religion, law and order). They are terrorized by internal forces (inherited characteristics, guilt). The question is always the same: are they cowards or not? Ibsen redefines courage so that it comes to apply to anyone who has the audacity to declare, like Nora in A Doll's House : 'I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.' This insistance on individualism and a concomitant belief in the difficulty of self-realisation had a massive influence on nineteenth-century culture and society. Of course, Ibsen retained some old-fashioned devices and ideas. All of his plays have melodramatic elements (the power of scandal, the appeal of fallen women, the return of past lovers, the dramatic potential of secrets and revelations). But, all in all, they embrace the contradictory nature of nineteenth- century Europe. They move the unstable and angst-ridden self to the centre of modern drama. Like Zola, Ibsen attacks the rottenness of bourgeois society. Like Chekhov, he patents a kind of domestic tragicomedy. But arguably, Ibsen's experiments with character and consciousness had a wider influence, even if Zola and Chekhov are now acknowledged to be greater writers. An 18-year-old James Joyce called Ibsen a 'great genius' who has 'provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any other living man'. One of Bernard Shaw's first books was The Quintessence of Ibsenism , in which he asserted that A Doll's House 'conquered Europe and founded a new school of dramatic art'. Henry James wrote that Hedda Gabler was 'saturated, above all, with a sense of the infinitude of character , finding that an endless romance and a perpetual challenge'. Ibsen purged nineteenth-century theatre of its sentimentality and artificiality. He relieved theatre of its traditional duty to entertain, an aspect of his work which would have a major impact on twentieth-century drama, particularly on the work of Artaud, Brecht and Ionesco. He redefined the notion of tragedy, creating characters with which a modern audience could identify. He also abandoned any conception of good and evil, making all of his protagonists flawed and ambivalent individuals with clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. In this way, he was the least political of writers, protesting that ideals and movements simplified and limited human activity. He wished to dramatize the parts of consciousness that politics could not address or articulate. In 1898, he was asked to speak to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights. He replied: 'I have never written any play to further a social purpose. I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people seem inclined to believe.' He used politics to examine psychological crisis, not the other way around. Ibsen was born in 1828 in Skien, a lumbering town in Norway. When Ibsen was young, his parents were comparatively wealthy: his father was a landowner and businessman. However, in 1834, his father's business failed, leaving him a bitter and litigious old man. Many of Ibsen's plays would investigate the effects of poverty on family units. Hedda Gabler can't bear to be poor and makes her husband run up debts. In Ghosts , Mrs Alving desperately tries to keep up a facade of affluence and gentility. In Peer Gynt , the hero has to try to live up to his father's name and restore the family fortunes. The same effect is discernable in the writings of Charles Dickens, a writer whose father also became a bankrupt. Like Dickens, Ibsen seems to be motivated by a terror of impoverishment and a vestigial sense of family honour. His plays dramatize the psychological implications of survival, struggle and defiance.

Ibsen left school at fifteen and, for six months, he worked as a pharmarcist's assistant. At the age of 17, he got a domestic servant pregnant, and she bore him a son. Although he had nothing to do with this child, it probably inspired his later obsession with youthful transgressions and hidden crimes, not to mention mistaken paternity and hereditary ailments. It also may have encouraged his belief in freedom of behaviour, the right to ignore restrictive moral codes. Ibsen then went to Oslo (then called Christiania) to enrol at the University. However he failed the Greek and mathematics sections of the entrance exams. Instead he became the assistant stage manager of the Norwegian Theatre at Bergen. His duties included composing and producing an original drama each year. Although Ibsen had tried to write before this (producing a verse drama called Catalina in 1850), it was the discipline of turning out efficient hack work for his employers at the Theatre Company that really taught him how to manipulate an audience, revise material, stimulate actors and generate dramatic interest. The only drawback was that he could not chose his subject-matter. This meant that for fifteen years, Ibsen produced dramatizations of Viking sagas and Norse myths that failed to genuinely fire his imagination. Few critics have bothered to argue for their importance. Ibsen was writing for the theatre, but he wasn't writing as himself. 'I was one man in my work and another outside', he later complained. Fortunately, in 1864, he was awarded a stipend by the Norwegian government. For the next twenty-seven years, he lived in Italy and Germany, returning to Norway only twice. He claimed that he needed this distance to write openly and honestly about Norwegian society. However he was probably also trying to inject a 'European' flavour into his work, so that it would no longer be restricted to parochial themes and obsessions. Between 1866 and 1879, Ibsen produced a wide range of work, including Brand (1866), a study of religious fanaticism, The League of Youth (1869), a satire of the Norwegian upper classes and The Pillars of Society (1877), a vicious attack on capitalism and civilization. However, his most enduring work of this period is probably Peer Gynt (1867), a broadly successful attempt to turn the Norwegian folk hero into an infuriating, irrepressible Everyman. Often this play is seen as an anomaly in the Ibsen canon, because it is disjointed, episodic, mythopoeic and humorous. However, it is one of Ibsen's first attempts to celebrate the rights of the individual, the power of the will, the complexity of love and the perversity of conventional morality. Peer Gynt makes his own way through the society of his time, fighting in wars, building up Empires, seducing women, fathering children and escaping prison. He is sometimes admirable, sometimes deplorable, but 'always himself'. In 1879, Ibsen published A Doll's House. This is still the most performed of all of his plays. It transformed Ibsen's life and it transformed European theatre. Today it is perhaps difficult to see exactly why Victorian audiences were so shocked by its dissection of an unhappy marriage. But it is still possible to appreciate why Ibsen was so angry about the constrictiveness of bourgeois morality. It is still easy to see why he decided to make his protagonist a woman, because even now, it is usually women who are policed and manipulated by moral and political orthodoxies. Ibsen brilliantly dramatizes the psychology of confinement, rebellion and flight. The premise of the story is that Nora Helmer has saved her husband's life ten years before by forging her father's signature on a loan and paying for her husband to have a rest cure at a health resort. During the course of the play, Nora is blackmailed by one of her husband's employees, Krogstad, who knows the details of her deception. When she threatens to drown herself, Krogstad goads her: 'A pampered little pretty like you [...] under the ice? Down in the cold, black water? And then, in the spring, to float up again, ugly, unrecognizable, hairless?' In the event, Krogstad is persuaded not to expose Nora, but unfortunately Nora's husband still finds out. He thinks he is going to be ostracized by society and he rages against his wife: 'You have destroyed all my happiness [...] The children shall be taken out of your hands [...] People may think that I was behind it.' He relents when he realises that Krogstad definitely won't expose him or Nora. But now Nora rebels. She thought that 'a miracle' would happen and that her husband would stand by her. He didn't. Nora says to him: 'It's your fault I have done nothing with my life.' She leaves, telling him: 'you neither think nor talk like the man I could share my life with.' A Doll's House was followed by Ghosts in 1881. If A Doll's House had savaged the behaviour of married men, Ghosts made it clear that male hypocrisy and corruption poisoned society in its entirety. It probably caused more uproar than the earlier play, because although Nora's husband was pig-headed, he was in his own way trying to love her. Mr Alving, the dead landowner in Ghosts , not only despises his wife, but infects her progeny with venereal disease. Syphilis was rife in Europe at the time, infecting a wide range of famous writers (e.g. Maupassant) and politicians (e.g. Lord Randolph Churchill). However, it was not

she has spirit, energy and a wicked sense of humour. Other characters are also depicted ambiguously. George Tesman, Hedda's husband, seems contemptible: he is a foolish and self-absorbed scholar, a buffoonish version of George Eliot's Casaubon. However he is generous and open-minded. Loevberg, Hedda's old lover, is a man of integrity and vision. However, 'he just doesn't know the meaning of the word moderation'. He is destructive and selfish. The play throws all of these people together, highlighting all of their best and worst features. Essentially it is the story of Hedda's disintegration. She tries to control the people around her, but ends up being controlled by them. 'Not free,' she rages, 'still not free!' The play ends with her suicide. All sorts of symbols emerge, especially the two pistols owned by Hedda Gabler, formerly owned by her father. They move around throughout the play. One of them is given to Loevberg. He is killed with it in a brothel. The other is retained by Hedda. She shoots herself with it in Act IV. However these symbols do not seem artificial or overwrought. They fit comfortably into the narrative. Ibsen's objective is always to suggest ordinary people succumbing to extraordinary pressures. The symbols never stop his characters acting naturally and plausibly. Hedda Gabler is, first and foremost, a work of social realism, a moving study of a flawed heroine, determined to retain her independence. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891. By this time, he had produced some of the greatest works of drama in any language. He had effected a revolution in theatrical form. All of the worst excesses of Victorian drama had been eschewed. Instead of relying on multiple sets, Ibsen's plays tend to be set in one or two locations: drawing rooms, attics, offices, studies, kitchens. Instead of massive, unwieldy casts, there are usually five or six characters in an Ibsen play. Instead of kings and queens, Ibsen's heroes are middle class or working class. In the place of theatrical stereotypes, Ibsen created complicated characters with credible personalities. He had come a long way from his early work, in which Viking heroes clashed tragically with the Gods. However, there was one final phase in Ibsen's development. Although none of his later plays are as powerful or memorable as Hedda Gabler or A Doll's House , they still show how Ibsen was continually attempting to expand the parameters of dramatic form. His last four plays are The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899). The Master Builder is perhaps the most compelling. Like most of his late plays, it is meditative and introspective, dwelling on isolation and failure. It is about the price paid for creativity. The main character, a master builder called Halvard Solness, has sacrificed his peace of mind and his personal happiness for the sake of his buildings. Was it worth it? His two sons died in a fire. His wife is going through a prolonged breakdown. He is losing his talent. Younger, brighter architects threaten to take his place. Would his life have been better if he had been untalented and obscure? About half way through the play, Halvard finds fresh inspiration in a young disciple, Hilde. She had met him ten years before when he still had talent and hope. She still believes in him. Inspired by her belief, he climbs to the top of one of his buildings, eventually falling to his death. It is a bizarre but effective piece of symbolism. The play ends with Hilde staring into the distance and muttering: ' My master builder!' It is unclear what the audience is supposed to take from the play. The message is confusing and contradictory. Perhaps fortunately it is also moving and gripping. Ibsen, like Shakespeare, ended his life with a series of revealing, symbolic tragi-comedies. There have been a massive number of studies of Ibsen's work. Michael Meyers published an excellent biography in 1974. Harold Clurman wrote a useful critical introduction in 1978. Other studies are also first class, like Critical Essays on Henrik Ibsen (1987), edited by Charles Lyons, and Henrik Ibsen (1983) by David Thomas. But to get a genuine sense of his legacy, it is perhaps best to read plays and novels by other writers. Ibsen survives in the operatic socialism of George Bernard Shaw. He is present in the Naturalism of Arnold Bennett and George Gissing. He inspired the 'scrupulous meanness' of Joyce's Dubliners. The drama of Brenton and Osborne and Berkoff and Pinter would have all looked very different without Ibsen. His plays are constantly being revived. A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler are repertory standards, while John Osborne's adaptation of Hedda Gabler was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1972, with Jill Bennett in the leading role. In Britain alone, the years 19 98 - 2000 saw important London revivals of Peer Gynt (with Alex Jennings) and The Enemy of the People (with Ian McKellen). Although Ibsen is often condemned as outdated and limited, critics, actors and audiences continue to find new ways of interpreting his greatest work. In spite of criticism, as Joyce put it, 'the great genius of the man is day by day coming out, as a hero comes out amid the earthly trials'.

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