Henrik Johan Ibsen born on 20th March 1828 in Skien, Grenland, United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. His parents were Knud Ibsen and Marichen Ibsen. Knud Ibsen's paternal ancestors were ship's captains of Danish origin, but he decided to become a merchant, having initial success. His marriage to Marichen Altenburg, a daughter of ship-owner Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763–1824) and Hedevig Christine Paus (1763–1848), was "an excellent family arrangement. Marichen's mother and Knud's step-father were sister and brother, and the bride and groom, who had grown up together, were practically regarded as sister and brother themselves. Marichen Altenburg was a fine catch, the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the prosperous lumber town of Skien." Theodore Jorgenson points out that "Henrik's ancestry [thus] reached back into the important Telemark family of Paus both on the father's and on the mother's side. Hedvig Paus must have been well known to the young dramatist, for she lived until 1848." Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents' "strange, almost incestuous marriage," and would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably his masterpiece Rosmersholm.
His father's financial ruin which began when he was only seven years old would later become one of the influences in his writings. Most of his plays also centralise on the suffering of women (as can be seen in Hedda Gabbler and A Doll's House).
The play "Catilina" was published in 1850 was written under the pseudyom Brynjolf Bjarme when he was 20 years old. However his play "Peer Gynt" made him famous as a playwright in 1876. Ibsen married Suzannah Thorensen on 18 June 1858 and by December 1859 had a son, Sigurd. Ibsen left Christiania on self imposed exile to Sorrento, Italy. bsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany, in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and began work on his first contemporary realist drama The Pillars of Society, first published and performed in 1877. A Doll's House followed in 1879. This play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen's society.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. He had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates him in his early autobiographical novel "Stephen Hero". Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.
Henrik Ibsen died on 23 March 1906 in his house in Christiania after a series of strokes in March 1900. He was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo (Christiania).
No comments:
Post a Comment