Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet active between roughly 1850 and 1900 who is generally regarded as the father of modern realist drama and, after Shakespeare, the most-performed dramatist in world theatre. His prose plays of the 1870s and 1880s reshaped European stagecraft.

Born in 1828 in the small port town of Skien in southern Norway to a once-prosperous merchant family that fell into bankruptcy in his childhood, Ibsen left school at fifteen to work as an apothecary's apprentice in Grimstad. He moved to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1850, failed his university entrance examinations, and instead took a post as resident playwright and stage manager at Det norske Theater in Bergen from 1851 to 1857.

Frustrated with Norwegian cultural life, Ibsen left the country in 1864 and lived abroad for twenty-seven years, mainly in Rome, Dresden, and Munich. The verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) made his European reputation, and from Pillars of Society (1877) onward he turned to contemporary prose plays that scandalised audiences with their treatment of marriage, social hypocrisy, and inherited disease, including A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892).

Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891 and lived in Christiania until his death in May 1906 after a series of strokes. He was buried with state honours.

The name Henrik is the Scandinavian, Dutch, and Hungarian form of Henry, from a Germanic root meaning home ruler; he wore it as a male given name.