Who is ibsen henrik

Stockmann discovers that the water of the small town spa he works for is tainted, and wants to make the fact known, but the community and the local government shun him. Ibsen also sought to expose the hypocrisy of morality in his portrayal of suffering women, which was inspired by what his mother endured during the period of financial duress in the family.

Ibsen was Norwegian, yet he wrote his plays in Danish as that was the common language shared by Denmark and Norway during his lifetime. Ibsen rewrote the rules of playwriting, opening the doors for plays to address or question morality, social issues, and universal conundrums, becoming works of art instead of sheer entertainment.

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Angelica Frey holds an M. Updated April 13, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkedalen out of wedlock. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Frey, Angelica. In , Ibsen had a series of strokes that left him unable to write. He managed to live for several more years, but he was not fully present during much of this time. Ibsen died on May 23, His last words were "To the contrary! Considered a literary titan at the time of his passing, he received a state funeral from the Norwegian government.

While Ibsen may be gone, his work continues to be performed around the world. Actresses, such as Gillian Anderson and Cate Blanchett , have taken on Ibsen's Nora and Hedda Gabler characters, which are considered to be two of the most demanding theatrical roles ever. In addition to his plays, Ibsen also wrote around poems.

Ibsen's works have held up over the years because he tapped into universal themes and explored the human condition in a way unlike any of those before him. Author James Joyce once wrote that Ibsen "has provoked more discussion and criticism that of any other living man.

Unlike many other writers and poets, Ibsen had a long and seemingly happy marriage to Suzannah Daae Thoresen. The couple wed in and welcomed their only child, son Sigurd, the following year. Ibsen also had a son from an earlier relationship. He had fathered a child with a maid in while working as an apprentice. While he provided some financial support, Ibsen never met the boy.

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Christopher Marlowe was a poet and playwright at the forefront of the 16th-century dramatic renaissance. Author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 60 mystery stories featuring the wildly popular detective character Sherlock Holmes and his loyal assistant Watson. Auden was a British poet, author and playwright best known as a leading literary figure in the 20th century for his poetry.

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Exiled Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote 'A Doll's House' and 'Hedda Gabler', the latter of which featured one of theater's most notorious characters. Olivia Rodrigo —. Megan Thee Stallion —. Bowen Yang —. See More. Since there were models for such a drama, Ibsen cannot be said to have invented the realistic, or social reform, play. However, he brought it to perfection and, in doing so, made himself the most famous, reviled and praised dramatist of the 19th century.

It should be stressed, however, that Ibsen had no intention of becoming merely a dramatist whose plays reflected contemporary manners and attacked social evils. He remained what he had always been, essentially antisociety, concerned with the individual and his problems. Ibsen solved the technical difficulties involved in translating his tragic vision from the romantic forms to a realistic form in two central ways. First, he developed a retrospective technique whereby, as the play progresses, the past events leading to the climax are gradually brought to light through the words and acts of the characters.

In Ibsen's hands but not always in those of his followers , the past is not just dead matter: it grips the present and changes its significance. Ibsen's characters live in a continual, exciting "now," moving toward the truth about themselves and their condition. Second, and equally important, was Ibsen's exploitation of visual imagery, whereby he gave his plays, through set, costume, and stage direction, much of the poetry denied the dramatist who deals with modern people speaking in everyday prose.

The term "Ibsenite," as used by G. Shaw, Ibsen's disciple and champion in England, describes a play which exposes individual and social hypocrisy.

It can be used, in the narrowest sense, only about Pillars of Society and A Doll's House , which do seem to stress the aspects of society and personal dishonesty that hinder personal development. But even Nora, in the latter play, is a sufficiently complex character to suggest other interpretations. Already in Ghosts , however, the heroine, Mrs. Alving, discovers that the forces working against human development are not just dead social conventions: there are forces in the individual that are more elusive and destructive than the "doll house" of marriage and society.

Alving's discovery and laughs at the social reformer. The laughter, however, is compassionate—the hero has a certain resemblance to Ibsen himself—and the play is one of Ibsen's finest comedies.

After Ibsen concentrated more and more on the individual and his dilemma, as he had done prior to , and on those timeless forces, reflected in individual psychology and working through social institutions, that hinder individual growth.

The Wild Duck might be said to introduce Ibsen's last period by showing how the average man needs illusions to survive and what happens to a family when something that may be truth is introduced into it. Here Ibsen also moved toward a new symbolism, rising from and intimately bound up with his realistic surfaces. In Rosmersholm , a man raised in a tradition of Christian duty and sacrifice tries, under the influence of a free, "pagan" woman, to break with his past.

The Lady from the Sea is considered a remarkable anticipation of psychotherapy, but the heroine's "cure" makes unconvincing theater. Hedda Gabler is a savage portrait of a frustrated woman, spiritually, sexually, and socially.

There is, however, much of Ibsen, as he saw himself at the time, in Hedda Gabler. With the exception of Little Eyolf , the weakest of the later plays, the last plays are, to a great extent, confessional.