Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen, playwright, poet and director, was born on March 20, 1828 in Skien, Norway, into an upper-middle-class family of successful merchants. At the age of fifteen, when he abandoned his studies to become an apprentice pharmacist in the city of Grimstad, he began to write his first plays. He decided to dedicate himself definitively to writing after failing the exams to enter the University of Kristiania, now Oslo. In 1850, at the age of twenty-two, he published, under a pseudonym, Catiline and Tomb of Warriors. He moved to Bergen to work at the Det Norske Teater, where he was responsible for the writing, staging and production of hundreds of plays, and later returned to the capital to take up the position of creative director of the Teatro de Cristiânia. During these years, he continued to write, but his production did not find an echo in the critics. In 1858, he married Suzannah Thorensen, with whom he had a son, Sigurd. In 1864, disenchanted with the country and the financial situation he was experiencing, he left Norway and settled in Sorrento, Italy. It was there, the following year, that he wrote Brand, the play that inaugurated his literary success, which was followed by Peer Gynt, considered his magnus opus, and for which Edvard Grieg composed the famous homonymous suite. In 1868, Ibsen, already a recognized and established playwright, then living in Germany, inaugurated the realist phase of his work with The Pillars of Society (1877), which was followed by Doll's House (1879), a play that earned him international recognition, and An Enemy of the People (1882), a triad of social dramas that denounced the prevailing moralism. Wild Ducks (1884), Rommersholm (1886) and Hedda Gabler (1890) constitute the final phase of the production of Ibsen, considered one of the most influential playwrights in Western literature and the author most often staged since Shakespeare. An attentive observer of society and a fierce critic of the atavistic moralism of the late nineteenth century, he anticipated many of the social criticisms and modern controversies with a singular poetic sense.