Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen lived from 20 March 1828 to 23 May 1906. He was a Norwegian playwright, widely seen as one of the top writers of the 1800s and often called the father of modern drama. He broke ground with theatrical realism but also produced lyrical epic works. His key plays 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*. As of 2014, he was the most performed dramatist globally after Shakespeare. The Norwegian encyclopedia *Store norske leksikon* calls him the center of the country's literary canon.

Ibsen came from the merchant elite of the port town of Skien. He had strong ties to the Paus family and other clans that had held wealth and power in Telemark since the mid-1500s. In the 1850s, he worked as a theater director in Norway. He gained international fame in the 1860s with *Brand* and *Peer Gynt*. From 1864, he spent 27 years living in Italy and Germany—mainly Rome, Dresden, and Munich—only briefly visiting Norway, before settling in Christiania (Oslo) in 1891. Most of his plays are set in Norway, often in bourgeois settings and places that recall Skien, and he frequently drew on family members for inspiration. His early verse play *Peer Gynt* has strong surreal elements. After that, he dropped verse and wrote in realistic prose. Many of his later dramas shocked his contemporaries, since European theater at the time was expected to uphold strict morals around family and propriety. Ibsen’s later work looked behind facades, revealing unsettling truths. He had a critical eye and freely examined life’s conditions and moral questions. Critics often rank *The Wild Duck* and *Rosmersholm* as his best; Ibsen himself considered *Emperor and Galilean* his masterpiece.

Ibsen is seen as one of the most important playwrights in world literature and the leading dramatist of the 1800s. Sigmund Freud ranked him with Shakespeare and Sophocles, while George Bernard Shaw claimed Ibsen had surpassed Shakespeare as the world’s top dramatist. Ibsen influenced writers like Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce. He is regarded as a profound poetic dramatist and the most significant playwright since Shakespeare. He is often described as the most famous Norwegian internationally. He wrote in Dano-Norwegian, and his plays were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen and a relative of singer Ole Paus.

Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828 into a wealthy merchant family in the prosperous port town of Skien, in Bratsberg county (Telemark). His father was merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen, his mother Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg. He grew up as part of the extended Paus family, centered on siblings Ole and Hedevig Paus and their close-knit households. His ancestors were mostly merchants and shipowners in Skien and Bergen, or members of Upper Telemark’s civil servant elite. Jørgen Haave notes that Ibsen had strong family ties to families that had held power and wealth in Telemark since the mid-1500s. Ibsen himself wrote that his parents were members of the most respected families in Skien on both sides, and that he was closely related to nearly all the patrician families who dominated the town. He was baptized at home in the Lutheran state church on 28 March, with the baptism confirmed at Christian’s Church on 19 June. At his birth, Skien had long been one of Norway’s most important and internationally connected cities, a hub for seafaring, timber exports, and early industrialization that made Norway a developed and prosperous part of Denmark–Norway.

Ibsen’s parents, Knud and Marichen, grew up as close relatives, sometimes called near-siblings. Both belonged to the intertwined Paus family of Rising and Altenburg House—the extended family of siblings Ole Paus and Hedevig Paus. 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 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 many half-siblings, including future governor Christian Cornelius Paus and 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 central 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 town. After his death in 1824, Hedevig took over the business. The siblings Ole and Hedevig Paus were born in Lårdal in Upper Telemark, where the Paus family belonged to the region’s official elite, and they moved to Skien at a young age with their oldest sister.