Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright. He is considered one of the world's pre-eminent writers of the 19th century and is often referred to as "the father of modern drama." He pioneered theatrical realism but also wrote lyrical epic works. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Store norske leksikon describes him as "the center of the Norwegian literary canon."
Ibsen was born into the merchant elite of the port town of Skien and had strong family ties to the Paus family and other families who had held power and wealth in Telemark since the mid-1500s. He established himself as a theater director in Norway during the 1850s and gained international recognition as a playwright with the plays Brand and Peer Gynt in the 1860s. From 1864, he lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, primarily in Rome, Dresden, and Munich, making only brief visits to Norway, before moving to Christiania in 1891. Most of Ibsen's plays are set in Norway, often in bourgeois environments and places reminiscent of Skien, and he frequently drew inspiration from family members. Ibsen's early verse play Peer Gynt has strong surreal elements. After Peer Gynt Ibsen abandoned verse and wrote in realistic prose. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind the façades, revealing much that was disquieting to a number of his contemporaries. He had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Critics frequently rate The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm as Ibsen's best works; the playwright himself regarded Emperor and Galilean as his masterpiece.
Ibsen is considered one of the most important playwrights in the history of world literature and is widely regarded as the foremost playwright of the nineteenth century. Sigmund Freud considered him on par with Shakespeare and Sophocles, while George Bernard Shaw argued that Ibsen had surpassed Shakespeare as the world's pre-eminent dramatist. Ibsen influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce. Considered a profound poetic dramatist, he is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. Ibsen is commonly described as the most famous Norwegian internationally. Ibsen wrote his plays in Dano-Norwegian, and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen and a relative of the singer Ole Paus.
Early life and background
Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828 into an affluent merchant family in the prosperous port town of Skien in the county of Bratsberg. He was the son of the merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen and Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg, and he grew up as a member of the extended Paus family, which consisted of the siblings Ole and Hedevig Paus and their tightly knit families. Ibsen's ancestors were primarily merchants and shipowners in cities such as Skien and Bergen, or members of the "aristocracy of officials" of Upper Telemark, the region's civil servant elite. Jørgen Haave writes that Ibsen "had strong family ties to the families who had held power and wealth in Telemark since the mid-1500s." Henrik Ibsen himself wrote that "my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien", and that he was closely related to "just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings." He was baptised at home in the Lutheran state church—membership of which was mandatory—on 28 March and the baptism was confirmed in on 19 June. When Ibsen was born, Skien had for centuries been one of Norway's most important and internationally oriented cities, and a centre of seafaring, timber exports and early industrialization that had made Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark–Norway.The Paus family of Rising and Altenburg House
Ibsen's parents, Knud and Marichen, grew up as close relatives, sometimes referred to as "near-siblings," and both belonged to the tightly intertwined Paus family of Rising and Altenburg House – that is, the extended family of the sibling pair Ole Paus and Hedevig Paus.File:Altenburg2.png|thumb|A silhouette of the Altenburg/Paus family in Altenburggården, with Ibsen's mother, maternal grandparents and other relatives. It is the only existing portrait of either of Ibsen's parents.
File:Rising i Gjerpen.jpg|thumb|Rising, Norway, Knud Ibsen's childhood home. The farm was bought by his stepfather Ole Paus in 1799, on the same day he sold the Ibsen house in Løvestrædet, which he had inherited from his wife Johanne's first husband Henrich Ibsen. Rising was the home of Henrik Ibsen's grandparents during his childhood and, along with Venstøp, stands as one of the two most significant preserved landmarks of his childhood environment.
After Knud's father Henrich Johan Ibsen died at sea when Knud was a newborn, his mother Johanne Plesner married captain Ole Paus the following year. Like Henrich Johan Ibsen before him, Paus thus became the brother-in-law of Skien's wealthiest man, Diderik von Cappelen. In 1799, Ole Paus sold the Ibsen House in Skien's Løvestrædet, which he had inherited from his wife's first husband, and bought the estate Rising outside Skien from a sister of his brother-in-law von Cappelen. Knud grew up at Rising with most of his many half-siblings, among them the later governor Christian Cornelius Paus and the shipowner Christopher Blom Paus. In the 1801 census the Paus family of Rising had seven servants.
Marichen grew up in the stately Altenburg House in the center of Skien with her parents Hedevig Paus and Johan Andreas Altenburg. Altenburg was a shipowner, timber merchant, and owned a large liquor distillery at Lundetangen and a farm outside of town, and after his death, Hedevig took over the business in 1824.
The siblings Ole and Hedevig Paus were born in Lårdal in Upper Telemark, where the Paus family belonged to the region's elite, the "aristocracy of officials," and had moved to Skien at a young age with their oldest sister, joining Skien's merchant elite with the support of their relatives in the family Blom. The children from Ole's and Hedevig's homes maintained close contact throughout Knud's and Marichen's childhood; notably, Ole's oldest son, Knud's half-brother Henrik Johan Paus, was raised in Hedevig's home. The Paus family reflects a meritocratic elite defined by education, priesthood, and public office.
Knud Ibsen's marriage to Marichen Altenburg
In 1825, Henrik's father Knud acquired the burghership of Skien and established an independent business as a timber and luxury goods merchant there, with his younger brother, Christopher Blom Paus, then aged 15, as his apprentice. The two brothers moved into the Stockmanngården building, where they rented a part of the building and lived with a maid. On the first floor the brothers sold foreign wines and a variety of luxury items, while also engaging in wholesale export of timber in cooperation with their first cousin Diderik von Cappelen. On 1 December 1825, Knud married his stepfather's niece Marichen, who then moved in with them. Henrik was born there in 1828. In 1830, Marichen's mother Hedevig left Altenburggården and her properties and business ventures to her son-in-law Knud, and the Ibsen family moved to Marichen's childhood home in 1831. During the 1820s and 1830s, Knud was a wealthy young merchant in Skien, and he was the city's 16th largest taxpayer in 1833.Older Ibsen scholars have claimed that Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents' "strange, almost incestuous marriage", and he would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably in his masterpiece Rosmersholm. On the other hand, Jørgen Haave points out that his parents' close relationship was not that unusual among the Skien elite.
Childhood
In his unfinished biography From Skien to Rome, Henrik Ibsen wrote about the Skien of his childhood:Haave writes that the sources who knew Henrik in childhood described him as "a boy who was pampered by his father, who enjoyed being creative in solitude, and who provoked peers with his superiority and arrogance." Henrik engaged in model theater, which was particularly popular among boys from bourgeois homes in Europe in the early 1800s. In contrast to his father, who was described as sociable and playful with a cheerful and friendly demeanor, Henrik was depicted as a more introverted personality. This trait was said to be shared with several relatives in the Paus family, and later with his own son, Sigurd. Johan Kielland Bergwitz claimed that "it is with the Paus family that Henrik Ibsen has the most pronounced temperament traits in common." Referring to the Paus side of the family, Hedvig Ibsen remarked, "we belong to a silent family," playfully echoing the similarity between "taus" and "Paus." One of the Cudrio sisters from the neighboring farm, who knew Henrik Ibsen in childhood, said, "he was immensely cunning and malicious, and he even beat us. But when he grew up, he became incredibly handsome, yet no one liked him because he was so malicious. No one wanted to be with him."
When Henrik Ibsen was around seven years old, his father's fortunes took a turn for the worse, and in 1835 the family was forced to sell Altenburggården. The following year they moved to their stately summer home and farm,, outside of the city. They were still relatively affluent, had four servants, and socialised with other members of the Skien elite, e.g. through lavish parties; their closest neighbours on Southern Venstøp were former shipowner and mayor of Skien Ulrich Frederik Cudrio and his family, who also had been forced to sell their townhouse. In 1843, after Henrik left home, the Ibsen family moved to a townhouse at Snipetorp, owned by Knud Ibsen's half-brother and former apprentice Christopher Blom Paus, who had established himself as an independent merchant in Skien in 1836 and who eventually became one of the city's leading shipowners. Knud continued to struggle to maintain his business and had some success in the 1840s, but in the 1850s his business ventures and professional activities came to an end, and he became reliant on support from his successful younger half-brothers.