A Doll's House (1879)
Nora leaves her patronising husband Torvald and her children, ending with a famous door slam
Literature · Playwrights
Henrik Ibsen
1828–1906 · Norwegian
Realism; modern drama
Henrik Ibsen, often called the father of modern drama, moved from verse plays such as Brand and Peer Gynt to prose dramas of middle-class life that exposed social hypocrisy. A Doll's House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler caused scandal across Europe and shaped playwrights from Shaw to Arthur Miller. He wrote much of his major work during 27 years of self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany.
How to spot them
- ▸Nora Helmer slamming the door at the end of A Doll's House
- ▸Hedda Gabler burning Løvborg's manuscript and shooting herself with her father's pistols
- ▸Peer Gynt, with Grieg's incidental music including 'In the Hall of the Mountain King'
- ▸Born in Skien, Norway; pharmacist's apprentice in Grimstad
- ▸Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
Key works
Hedda Gabler (1890)
A general's daughter, bored in her marriage to the academic Tesman, destroys Eilert Løvborg and herself
Peer Gynt (1867)
Verse drama of a boastful Norwegian wanderer, with trolls, the Button-Moulder and the faithful Solveig
Ghosts (1881)
Mrs Alving's son Oswald has inherited the syphilis of his dissolute late father
An Enemy of the People (1882)
Dr Stockmann exposes contaminated spa baths and is turned on by his town
The Wild Duck (1884)
Gregers Werle's truth-telling destroys the Ekdal family's 'life-lie', and young Hedvig dies
The Master Builder (1892)
The ageing architect Halvard Solness, urged on by young Hilde Wangel, falls from his tower
Brand (1866)
Verse tragedy of an uncompromising priest, 'All or nothing'; his first great success
Key ideas
- Brought realistic prose drama about contemporary social and moral problems to the European stage
- The 'life-lie' (The Wild Duck): the comforting illusion people need in order to live
- A Doll's House became a landmark in debates on marriage and women's rights, though Ibsen said he wrote about human rights generally
- His retrospective technique reveals past secrets gradually during the action
Quick-fire facts
- •Born on 20 March 1828 in Skien, Norway; died on 23 May 1906 in Christiania (now Oslo)
- •Worked as a pharmacist's apprentice in Grimstad, where he fathered an illegitimate son
- •Was stage director and resident dramatist at Ole Bull's Norwegian Theatre in Bergen in the 1850s
- •Lived abroad, mainly in Rome, Dresden and Munich, from 1864 to 1891
- •Edvard Grieg composed incidental music for Peer Gynt (1876)
- •For a German production of A Doll's House he reluctantly wrote an alternative ending in which Nora stays
- •His last play was When We Dead Awaken (1899)
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Henrik Ibsen
- Robert Ferguson — Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography