Henrik Ibsen was the eldest of five children born into a wealthy merchant family at Skien, a small seaside town in southeast Norway on 20 March 1828. However his father's bankruptcy eight years later led to poverty and poor schooling, which fostered the rebellious attitude that would become a theme throughout his life. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a pharmacist for a time, however the Independence of Norway developed a patriotic fervour in Ibsen that led him to write poetry and become involved in politics. In 1850 he moved to Christiania and while preparing for university entrance exams wrote his first play Cataline. He failed the exams but continued to write verse, and began to produce satiric articles for several liberal publications. After the government broke up the underground revolutionary group he had joined he moved away from political life completely.
In 1851 violinist Ole Bull helped Ibsen obtain the position of ‘theatre poet' at the theatre in Bergen. He stayed there until 1857 when he became director of the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania. He married Suzannah Thoresen in 1858 and their only child and son, Sigurd, was born the next year; it was during this time he had success with his satire Love's Comedy. Disappointment and despair following the Theatre's bankruptcy led to heavy drinking and after being further discouraged by political events Ibsen accepted an award for foreign travel from the government and travelled to Italy. He did not return to Norway for 27 years.
While Ibsen was in Italy he wrote Brand (1866), a verse drama about an ideal reformer, which earned him a government pension for the rest of his life; with his monetary worries over he turned his attention to writing. Peer Gynt (1867) was also a verse drama but an antithesis to Brand, being the story of a careless, self-indulgent fortune seeker. Both plays belong to what scholars call Ibsen's Romantic Period (1850-1877). The plays written during this period tend to be wild and epic, utilising an open form and concentrating on mystical, romantic, poetic visions of the rebel figure in search of an ultimate truth which is always just out of reach.
The second period of Ibsen's writing has been called the Realistic Period (1877-1890), this period was initiated with his play Pillars of Society (1877) and also included The Dollhouse (1879), Ghosts (1881), Enemy of the People (1882), and Hedda Gabler (1890). These plays were characterised by their ‘realism' a self-imposed discipline that the playwright hoped would help his audiences to more easily digest his radical views. The major themes during this time were to do with the moral and ethical relations of man to man.
The third phase, or period, of Ibsen's writing, The Symbolist Period (1892-1899) saw a return to the more mystical subjects of his youth. The four plays of this period, The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899) seem to represent a realisation of defeat, they are heavily symbolic with the dialogue often having a second meaning.
In 1891, Ibsen returned to Norway and settled in Christiania where he lived a quiet retired life. A severe stroke left him an invalid until his death on 23 May 1906.