65 Facts About Henrik Ibsen

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 was born into the merchant elite of the port town of Skien, and had strong family ties to the families who had held power and wealth in Telemark since the mid-1500s.

Henrik Ibsen 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.

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

Henrik 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 Henrik Ibsen had surpassed Shakespeare as the world's pre-eminent dramatist.

Henrik Ibsen influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce.

Henrik Ibsen is commonly described as the most famous Norwegian internationally.

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

Henrik Ibsen was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen and a relative of the singer Ole Paus.

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 was the son of the merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen and Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg, and he grew up socially as a member of the Paus family, which consisted of the siblings Ole and Hedevig Paus and their tightly knit families.

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.

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.

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.

In contrast to his father, who was described as sociable and playful with a cheerful and friendly demeanor, Henrik Ibsen was depicted as a more introverted personality.

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.

Historically, Henrik Ibsen's background was romanticized or dramatized to align with the mythos of the self-made genius.

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 modeled and named characters in his plays after his own family.

Henrik Ibsen grew up in the tightly-knit extended family of the siblings Ole Paus and Hedevig Paus, his social paternal grandfather and biological maternal grandmother.

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 only visited Norway a few times during those years.

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.

Always an iconoclast, Henrik Ibsen saw himself as an objective observer of society, "like a lone franc tireur in the outposts", playing a lone hand, as he put it.

When working on the play, Henrik Ibsen received his only visit from a relative during his decades in exile, when 21-year old Christopher Paus paid an extended visit to him in Rome.

Shortly after the visit Henrik Ibsen declared that he had overcome a writer's block.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Henrik Ibsen's Borkman was a particularly well received play with several contemporary translations, including one by Mori Ogai.

Henrik Ibsen's ancestry has been a much studied subject, due to both his perceived foreignness and 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 had an illegitimate child early in his life, not entitled to the family name or inheritance.

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.