Sunday, March 20, 2016

"You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."

It’s the birthday of playwright Henrik Ibsen, born in Skien, Norway (1828). His father was a merchant, but when the boy was seven, his father’s business failed and the affluent family lost all their money. Their friends abandoned them, they moved to a dilapidated country house, and his parents couldn’t afford to continue their son’s schooling beyond the age of 15. Ibsen was apprenticed to an apothecary in a very small town. He didn’t make friends easily; instead, he used what little spare time he had in the evenings to write and paint. He studied Latin to prepare for university entrance exams, and he became so interested in Cicero’s speeches that he wrote his first play, Catilina, about a rebellious Roman senator who featured heavily in Cicero’s work. One of Ibsen’s friends, who had inherited some money, published the play at his own expense under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme, but no one wanted to produce the play and it didn’t sell many copies.

In 1850, after six years with the apothecary, Ibsen moved to Norway’s capital city of Christiania (now Oslo). He intended to study medicine at the university, but he failed his entrance exams. That same year, his second play, The Burial Mound, was staged, but it was a flop. Soon after, he met Ole Bull, a famous violinist and a passionate champion of restoring Norwegian culture — Norway was recently independent of Denmark, who had occupied it for more than 400 years. Bull was in the process of co-founding a theater in Bergen — it would be the first theater in which actors spoke in Norwegian instead of Danish. Despite Ibsen’s recent failures, Bull recognized the young man’s talent, and offered him a position as a writer and manager at the new theater. There, Ibsen staged more than 140 plays, including five original works, and received a crash course in all aspects of theater work. From there, he went on to manage a new theater in Christiania, but it was a disaster — he was constantly attacked in the press, and the theater eventually went bankrupt. Ibsen was living in poverty, drinking constantly, and his writing suffered. He was turned down for government grants. Finally, some of his worried friends raised private funds to supplement a small government grant and send him to Rome to work.

Ibsen fell in love with Rome. He enjoyed the warmth and sunshine, the art and relics, the people, and the landscape. He found no shortage of inspiration. In January of 1865, he wrote to a friend: “How glorious nature is down here! Both in form and color there is an indescribable harmony. I often lie for half a day among the tombs on the Via Latina, or on the old Appian Way; and I do not think this idling can be called waste of time.” He then asked his friend for more money, and added: “You may be quite certain that I shall join forces with you cordially in everything when I get home; for home I shall go, although I believe I said the contrary in the letter which I now wish and hope you may not have read.”

That year he finished his play Brand (1866), a tragedy about a priest so committed to his rigid moral code that he loses his family. A year later, he published Peer Gynt (1867), a satire of Norwegian culture based loosely on a fairy tale. These two plays made Ibsen famous and brought him critical and commercial success. Despite his promise to his friend, he didn’t return home for 27 years.

Ibsen’s other plays include Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), and Hedda Gabler (1890).

He said, “You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”
-WRITERS ALMANAC

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