Henrik Ibsen

Biography

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director, widely regarded as the father of modern drama. Born in Skien, Norway, Ibsen spent much of his creative life in self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany. His realistic prose dramas—A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People—shocked audiences by addressing taboo subjects: women’s rights, venereal disease, corruption, and the suffocating hypocrisy of bourgeois society. His plays revolutionized European theatre and influenced virtually every major dramatist of the twentieth century, from Shaw and Chekhov to Arthur Miller and beyond.