63 Facts About Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director.

Henrik Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House was the world's most performed play in 2006.

Henrik Ibsen had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality.

Henrik Ibsen is often ranked as one of the most distinguished playwrights in the European tradition, and is widely regarded as the foremost playwright of the nineteenth century.

Henrik Ibsen influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, Marguerite Yourcenar, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, and Miroslav Krleza.

Henrik Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902,1903, and 1904.

Henrik Ibsen wrote his plays in Dano-Norwegian, and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal.

Henrik Ibsen's dramas were informed by his background in the merchant elite of Skien, and he often modelled or named characters after family members.

Henrik Ibsen was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828 in Stockmanngarden into an affluent merchant family in the prosperous port town of Skien in Bratsberg.

Henrik 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.

Knud Henrik Ibsen's father, ship's captain and merchant Henrich Johan Henrik Ibsen, died at sea when he was newborn in 1797 and his mother Johanne Plesner married captain Ole Paus the following year; Knud grew up as a member of the Paus family.

Henrik Ibsen's stepfather Ole Paus was a descendant of the "aristocracy of officials" in Upper Telemark; as a child Paus had been taken in by a relative, Skien merchant Christopher Blom, and he had become a ship's captain and shipowner in Skien, acquiring the burghership in 1788.

Altenburg was a shipowner, timber merchant and owned a liquor distillery at Lundetangen and a farm outside of town; after his death in 1824 the widow Hedevig, Henrik Ibsen's grandmother, took over the businesses.

In 1830 Marichen's mother Hedevig left Altenburggarden and her properties and business ventures to her son-in-law Knud, and the Henrik Ibsen family moved to Marichen's childhood home in 1831.

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 Altenburggarden.

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.

Haave points out that virtually all of Henrik Ibsen's ancestors had been wealthy burghers and higher government officials, and members of the local and regional elites in the areas they lived, often of continental European ancestry.

Many Henrik Ibsen scholars have compared characters and themes in his plays to his family and upbringing; his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society.

Henrik Ibsen himself confirmed that he both modelled and named characters in his plays after his own family.

Henrik Ibsen moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist.

Henrik Ibsen went to Christiania intending to matriculate at the university.

Henrik Ibsen soon rejected the idea, preferring to commit himself to writing.

Still, Henrik Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful.

Henrik Ibsen spent the next several years employed at Det norske Theater, where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer.

Henrik Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of the Christiania Theatre.

Henrik Ibsen married Suzannah Thoresen on 18 June 1858 and she gave birth to their only child Sigurd on 23 December 1859.

The couple lived in difficult financial circumstances and Henrik Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway.

Henrik Ibsen spent the next 27 years in Italy and Germany and would only visit Norway a few times.

Henrik Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany, in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean, dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate.

Henrik 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.

Henrik Ibsen was already in his fifties when A Doll's House was published.

Henrik Ibsen himself saw his latter plays as a series.

Henrik Ibsen illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving.

Henrik Ibsen expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows.

Late in his career, Henrik Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society's moral values and more to do with the problems of individuals.

In such later plays as Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder, Henrik Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions.

Henrik 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 theatre to this day.

From Henrik Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment.

Henrik Ibsen's works were brought to an English-speaking audience, largely thanks to the efforts of William Archer and Edmund Gosse.

Henrik Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left.

However, asked later what he had read when he wrote Catiline, Henrik Ibsen replied that he had read only the Danish Norse saga-inspired Romantic tragedian Adam Oehlenschlager and Ludvig Holberg, "the Scandinavian Moliere".

At the time when Henrik Ibsen was writing, literature was emerging as a formidable force in 19th century society.

Henrik Ibsen's plays, from A Doll's House onwards, caused an uproar: not just in Norway, but throughout Europe, and even across the Atlantic in America.

Henrik Ibsen often advised directors on which actor or actress would be suitable for a particular role.

Henrik Ibsen's plays initially reached a far wider audience as read plays rather than in performance.

Each new play that Henrik Ibsen wrote, from 1879 onwards, had an explosive effect on intellectual circles.

On 23 May 1906, Henrik Ibsen died in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania after a series of strokes in March 1900.

Henrik Ibsen was buried in Var Frelsers gravlund in central Oslo.

In 2006, the homebuilding company Selvaag opened Peer Gynt Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway, in Henrik Ibsen's honour, making it possible to follow the dramatic play Peer Gynt scene by scene.

Henrik Ibsen developed as a person and artist in a dialogue with Danish theater and literature that was anything but smooth.

The social questions which concerned Henrik Ibsen belonged unequivocally to the 19th century.

Every year, since 2008, the annual "Delhi Henrik Ibsen Festival", is held in Delhi, India, organized by the Dramatic Art and Design Academy in collaboration with The Royal Norwegian Embassy in India.

Henrik Ibsen's ancestry has been a much studied subject, due to his perceived foreignness and due to the influence of his biography and family on his plays.

Henrik Ibsen often made references to his family in his plays, sometimes by name, or by modelling characters after them.

The oldest documented member of the Henrik Ibsen family was ship's captain Rasmus Henrik Ibsen from Stege, Denmark.

Henrik Ibsen had Danish, German, Norwegian and some distant Scottish ancestry.

Henrik Ibsen's ancestors had mostly lived in Norway for several generations, even though many had foreign ancestry.

The name Henrik Ibsen is originally a patronymic, meaning "son of Ib".

From his marriage with Suzannah Thoresen, Henrik Ibsen had one son, lawyer, government minister, and Norwegian Prime Minister Sigurd Henrik Ibsen.

Henrik Ibsen was decorated Knight in 1873, Commander in 1892, and with the Grand Cross of the Order of St Olav in 1893.

Henrik Ibsen received the Grand Cross of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog, and the Grand Cross of the Swedish Order of the Polar Star, and was Knight, First Class of the Order of Vasa.

In 1995, the asteroid 5696 Henrik Ibsen was named in his memory.