Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906) was born in Skien, a small timber port in southeastern Norway, and became the most important dramatist since Shakespeare — the writer who, more than any other, created the modern theatre. His prose plays of the 1870s and 1880s — A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler — brought the suppressed truths of bourgeois domestic life onto the stage with a force that scandalized Europe and permanently transformed what drama could be and do.

Life and Career

Ibsen’s father went bankrupt when Henrik was eight, and the experience of social humiliation — of respectability destroyed — haunts his mature work. He was apprenticed to a pharmacist at fifteen and fathered an illegitimate child at eighteen — a fact he concealed for years. He worked as a theatre director in Bergen and Christiania (Oslo) through the 1850s and early 1860s, writing verse dramas — Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) — that made his reputation in Scandinavia.

In 1864, disgusted with Norwegian provincialism and with the country’s failure to support Denmark in the war with Prussia, Ibsen left Norway for what became twenty-seven years of voluntary exile in Italy and Germany. It was abroad, at a distance, that he wrote the plays that transformed world theatre.

A Doll’s House (1879) — in which Nora Helmer walks out on her husband and children, slamming the door behind her — was the theatrical thunderclap of the century. “That door-slam,” Georg Brandes wrote, “was heard around the world.” The play was denounced as an attack on marriage, family, and civilization; it was also the most talked-about play in European history.

Ghosts (1881), dealing with venereal disease, euthanasia, and the sins of the father, provoked even greater outrage. It was banned in London; when it was finally performed there in 1891, one critic called it “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly.” This was exactly what Ibsen intended.

The great sequence of prose plays continued through the 1880s and 1890s: An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892). Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, internationally famous. He suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1900 and died on 23 May 1906.

Major Works and Themes

Ibsen’s great innovation was to bring the techniques of the well-made play — tight construction, revelatory dialogue, the gradually disclosed secret — to the service of psychological and social truth rather than theatrical entertainment. His plays strip away the respectable surfaces of bourgeois life to reveal the lies, compromises, and repressed desires beneath.

Hedda Gabler (1890) is his most psychologically complex creation: a portrait of a woman of intelligence and ambition trapped in a society that offers her no outlet, whose destructive energy turns inward. The Master Builder (1892) and When We Dead Awaken (1899) are late, symbolic works in which the realist surface gives way to allegory and dream.

Ibsen and Strindberg: The Rivalry

Ibsen’s most consequential literary relationship was with August Strindberg — and it was conducted almost entirely through their plays, since the two barely met. Strindberg initially revered Ibsen, then came to despise him, particularly after A Doll’s House, which Strindberg saw as feminist propaganda. His own play The Father (1887) was partly a furious response: where Ibsen depicted a wife’s liberation, Strindberg depicted a husband’s destruction by a wife’s manipulation. The two dramatists represent antithetical visions of gender, power, and the domestic sphere, and the tension between them — Ibsen’s rational, morally purposeful drama versus Strindberg’s expressionistic, psychologically violent one — generated the two main currents of modern theatre.

Ibsen was aware of Strindberg’s hostility and reportedly kept a portrait of him above his desk: “He is my mortal enemy, and shall hang there and watch while I write.” Whether the anecdote is true, it captures the productive antagonism between them. Modern drama descends from both — realism from Ibsen, expressionism from Strindberg — and most important twentieth-century playwrights combine elements of each.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Ibsen is the founder of modern drama. Shaw championed him in England; Chekhov responded to him in Russia; Strindberg both worshipped and competed with him in Sweden. Every major twentieth-century playwright — O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Pinter, Albee — works in the tradition that Ibsen established. His influence extends beyond the stage: the Ibsenian method of gradually disclosing a hidden past through dialogue became a foundational technique of literary fiction and cinema (Hitchcock acknowledged the debt). The dramaturgical architecture of his mature plays — the careful withholding and release of information, the use of apparently trivial objects (Nora’s macaroons, Hedda’s pistols) as symbols of repressed desire — remains the standard grammar of realistic drama.

Key Works

• Brand (1866)
• Peer Gynt (1867)
• A Doll’s House (1879)
• Ghosts (1881)
• An Enemy of the People (1882)
• The Wild Duck (1884)
• Hedda Gabler (1890)
• The Master Builder (1892)
• When We Dead Awaken (1899)

Collecting Ibsen

Scandinavian first editions published by Gyldendalske Boghandel (Copenhagen) are the primary targets, as Ibsen’s plays were published in Danish.

Et Dukkehjem (A Doll’s House, 1879, Gyldendal, Copenhagen) is the most historically significant first edition. Copies bring $2,000–$8,000.

Gengangere (Ghosts, 1881, Gyldendal) is equally desirable given the scandal that surrounded it. Hedda Gabler (1890, Gyldendal) and Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder, 1892, Gyldendal) are the other major collecting targets.

English-language first editions — particularly the early translations by William Archer (Walter Scott Publishing, 1890s) and the first London performances’ programmes — are secondary targets. Ibsen manuscripts are held primarily by the National Library of Norway in Oslo.