Henrik, John and Ibsen (1828-1906), born in Sheehan, Norway, was an influential Norwegian playwright who is considered the founder of modern realist theatre.

Many of his plays were considered scandalous at the time, as Victorian family values and manners were social norms, and any perception that questioned or challenged that norm was considered immoral and abominable.

Ibsen's work shows the reality below this surface, which society at the time did not want to see.

Ibsen looked at the reality of life with a merciless eye and raised new moral questions, which led to the creation of modern drama.

Before him, the drama was always a moral educational drama, with its noble protagonist fighting against the forces of darkness. Every drama should have a "proper" ending, good people should have good endings, and immoral people should be punished.

Ibsen turned this template upside down, challenging the beliefs of the time and destroying the illusions of his audience.

Ibsen was born into a family of timber merchants in the small town of Sheehan, southern Norway.

His hometown is a small port on the Norwegian coast, which mainly exports timber. Soon after he was born, his family's situation began to deteriorate. His mother tried to find comfort in religion, while his father was in a state of depression.

The characters in Ibsen's works tend to resemble his parents, while his plots are often related to financial hardship.

Ibsen left his parents at the age of 15 and went to the small town of Grimstad at the age of 16 as an apprentice in a pharmacy and began writing plays.

As a young man, he was influenced by the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Europe. He participated in the Norwegian National Independence Movement.

In 1848, he began to write poems and plays, the first of which was the three-act poetic play Kati Lane.

In 1850, Ibsen went to Oslo to apply for university, but was not accepted, and completed his first play in the same year, when he was only 22 years old, but this play was not staged, and his first play was "The Graveyard" in the same year, but this play did not receive much attention. Although he did not write again for several years. But he didn't give up writing plays.

Year 1851. He was recommended to join the Bergen Theatre as a playwright and stage director, and began his career as a professional dramatist.

While working at the Norwegian Theatre, he became a writer, director and producer and participated in the production of 145 plays.

During this time, he didn't write his own plays. But he gained a lot of practical experience from his work. And these experiences later played a great role in his plays.

Year 1857. He returned to Oslo. He was in a very bad financial situation at the time, but he married in 1859. He was very dissatisfied with life in Norway, so in 1864 he went to Italy.

He did not return to his homeland for 27 years. And when he returned to Norway. He is already a controversial, but well-known playwright.

His next two plays, Blund (1865) and Peer and Gynt (1867), brought him the attention and financial success he had hoped for.

These successes gave him self-confidence, and he began to incorporate his own trust and judgment more and more into his plays. He called it "the drama of ideas."

His subsequent series of plays have been called his golden age. His prestige grew, and he himself increasingly became the center of controversy in European playmaking.

He died in Oslo in 1906.

Ibsen's playmaking can be roughly divided into three periods. Most of his early plays were based on ancient Norwegian heroic legends, ballads and history, and were romantic dramas with national colors.

Based on the legends of ancient Norwegian heroes and medieval folk creations, he has adapted several plays, such as "Kettiline", "Lady Inge", "Olaf Lillekron", "The Man on the Throne", etc.

"Mrs. Inge" depicts the story of Lady Inge, a heroine in northern Norway in the 16th century, while "The Man on the Throne" is about Norway's struggle from feudal secession to national unification.

Later, "Blund" and "Pierre Ginter" began to shift towards realism.

The middle period was between 1869 and 1890, and after the 70s of the 19th century, the Paris Commune revolution caused the intensification of social contradictions in Europe, which deepened Ibsen's understanding of capitalist society and institutions.

He shifted his attention from medieval folklore to the realities of today's life. His work shifted from romanticism to realism.

He often uses daily life as the material to analyze social problems from various aspects, exposing and criticizing the various evils of bourgeois society, touching on various fields such as law, religion, morality, and even the state, political parties, and systems. That's why people call it a "social problem drama".

His important plays include "Youth League", "Pillars of Society", "A Doll's House", "Ghosts", "Enemies of the People" and so on. In 1891, when Ibsen was sixty-three years old, he returned to his homeland after a long absence, and spent his later years in Oslo.

On Ibsen's 70th birthday in 1898, the Norwegian cultural community gathered to celebrate his birthday, and the Norwegian National Theatre erected a bronze statue in his honor.

Ibsen wrote twenty-six plays and many poems in his lifetime. His plays have had a profound and extensive impact on the development of modern theatre, so he is known as the "father of modern theatre".

Commentary – Ibsen's 1879 A Doll's House is a sharp critique of the roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.

His protagonist, Nora, leaves her husband after realizing that he is not the noble person she always thought he was, and goes in search of a wider world.

Her role in the family is a doll, and her family is a "family of dolls". Her husband always calls her "my little bird" or "my little squirrel".

She doesn't even have the right to have her own letterbox key. In order to save her husband's life, she forged her father's name on the IOU. For this reason, someone asked her for blackmail.

Her husband was divorcing her because the only thing that mattered to her husband was his own reputation, not Nala's love for him.

After the performance of "A Doll's House", it aroused criticism and accusations from the bourgeois society, especially Nala's departure, which attracted a lot of criticism, thinking that Nala did not abide by women's morals and so on.

Later, the person who told Nala withdrew the blackmail, which in Victoria's drama could have solved all problems, but it was too late for Ibsen and Nora, and they could not return.

Nala's illusions are shattered. She decided to leave her husband and children. Leave her family of dolls to discover what's real and what's not. For those of the time, it was a scandal. Divorce is a very humiliating thing, and it is completely unacceptable to portray divorce in this way.

Some theaters refused to put on the play. Ibsen was forced to write a ending that was not so dark. This made him very angry. In the last moments before the premiere, he proposed a "change".

The Ghost of 1881 is another critique of Victorian morality. A widow confesses to the pastor for the sins of her marriage. Despite the unfaithfulness of her beloved. Her pastor had advised her to marry her beloved, believing that her love could influence her lover, so she listened to her pastor and married her lover. But she didn't get what she had hoped for.

Until his death, he continued to associate with other women. As a result, their children developed syphilis. At that time, even the mention of this STD was already a scandal. It is even more inconceivable that Ibsen went against the conventions of the time by making a person who was very moral according to the morality of the time not only not protected by this morality, but also a victim.

She did not receive the noble life to which she was entitled according to Victorian morality, although she did her duty. These ideal morals are the ghosts of the "past" that persecute people today.

At this time, the criticism of Ibsen in society was at its peak. But society itself has lost control of its masses. Many people do not live in the ideal life of Victoria. They wanted to see Ibsen's plays, because they showed the reality of what they already knew. The tide of society has changed.

In 1882's "An Enemy of the People", Ibsen took another step outward. Conflict is important at this point and is a necessary element of the plot, but all conflicts are on a family basis. In this drama, conflict becomes the content of the plot, and the whole society becomes the villain.

The central idea of the play is that the individual may sometimes be more "right" than the public, and the public is ignorant and lamb-like in the play.

Victorians believed that society was a noble, trustworthy institution, and Ibsen challenged this belief.

The protagonist is a doctor and a pillar of society. The town where he lived was a sanctuary of healing, and at its center were the city's public baths.

The protagonist discovers that the water in the baths has been polluted by a local tannery. He hopes to become a local hero when his findings are published, as he saves the town's reputation and prevents the infection of its recuperating guests. On the contrary, he was regarded as an "enemy of the people" by the locals, and later some people even threw stones at his home.

He was forced to leave the town. For the audience, both the town and the doctor face an obvious disaster, but the local society is unwilling to face the facts.

By this time the audience had become accustomed to his attacks on preconceived beliefs and assumptions, but his next play was not an attack on Victorians, but on overzealous reformers and their idealism.

Ibsen was an opponent of idolatry, even in the minds of those who took his own political positions.

The 1884 Wild Duck is considered by many to be one of Ibsen's best works, and it is also one of Ibsen's most complex works. In this play, Grieg returns to his hometown after many years away from his hometown and meets his childhood friend, Black Amma.

Grieg insisted on his search for truth, or in his own words, "the call of truth." As the play progresses, he discovers many secrets behind his friend's happy family, including his own father having a child with his maid Gina, and in order to cover up this fact, his father legitimizes the child by marrying Gina to Black Ama.

In addition, another person was wrongfully sentenced to prison for a case he had committed on his father. Black Ama spends his days thinking only about his inventions, and his family's income is earned by his wife.

Ibsen uses a counter-deprecation: although Grieg insists on the truth, he never says what he wants to say, but always hints that no one understands what he is saying until the peak of the play.

Black Ama kept Grieg's hints and code words on deaf ears until he realized the truth: his daughter Hedwig was not his own child.

Influenced by Grieg, he abandoned the child in order to insist on the truth. Realizing what he had done wrong, Grieg decided to make amends, suggesting that Hedwig sacrifice her pet, a wounded wild goose, to prove her love to Black Arma.

Hedwig is the only one of all the characters who realizes that Grieg usually always says what he has to say in a suggestive way, and instead of realizing that this time Grieg directly says what he means, she tries to find out what Grieg is suggesting her to do, and finally decides to sacrifice herself to prove her love.

Black Ama and Grieg recognize that sometimes the truth is unbearable for the human heart, but their realization comes too late.

Ibsen's most staged play is probably 1890's Hedda and Gabler, in which the heroine is still regarded as the most difficult and perfect role, and she bears some resemblance to Nala in A Doll's House.

Ibsen completely changed the rules of playwriting. Today, his realism is the basis for many of the plays we see in the theater. Beginning with Ibsen, the challenge of reality and the direct reflection of reality in drama have transformed drama from an entertainment to an art.

Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but Norway was no longer the Norway he had left. In fact, he played an important role in changing this society. The Victorian era was already crumbling, and modern society had arrived not only in the theater, but in the whole of social life. (To be continued......)