Henrik Ibsen was born in the Stockman Building in Skien, Norway. He spent part of his childhood on Venstøp Farm after his father went bankrupt. In 1843, he was apprenticed to a chemist in Grimstad. That was when he began writing satire and elegant poems in the style of the time. He wrote his first play in 1849, a five-act tragedy in verse, Catiline, which was published in 1850 under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme. The Warrior's Barrow was written and performed in 1850, as the first of Ibsen's plays to reach the stage. However, it was not published until much later. Ibsen lived in Christiania (now Oslo) from 1850 to 1851 to complete his upper secondary education. From 1851 to 1857, Ibsen was playwright in residence and director of the theatre in Bergen.
	While there, he wrote St. John’s Night (written in 1852), Lady Inger of Osteraad (written in 1854, published in 1857), The Feast at Solhaug (written in 1855, published in 1856), and Olaf Liljekrans (written in 1856). All these plays were inspired by folk songs, folklore or history, all of which are leitmotifs that run through Ibsen’s works. Ibsen became creative director of The Norwegian Theater in Christiania in 1858. The next year, he wrote the historical play The Vikings at Helgeland. The Pretenders was written in 1863. Beside Bjornstjerne Bjornson’s Sigurd Slembe, The Pretenders is considered the main work of historical fiction produced during this era. Henrik Ibsen married Suzannah Thoresen (1836-1914) in 1858. Soon after, he wrote the poem "On the Heights"(1859) and the play Love’s Comedy (1863). The years in Christiania were difficult for Ibsen. He was given a means of escape when a group of his friends, headed by Bjornstjerne Bjornson, collected enoughmoney for him to move to Italy in 1864. Shortly after moving, Ibsen began a major drama about Julian, but he did not complete the work until 1873, when it was published as Emperor and Galilean. The Epic Brand, a major epic-lyric poem, led to the lyric drama Brand (1866), Ibsen’s first real success as a writer. His next major work followed close on the heels of this success when he penned Peer Gynt in 1867.
	Ibsen moved to Dresden in 1868, then to Munich in 1875. In 1869, he wrote the comedy The League of Youth. The realistic style used to stage the drama Pillars of Society (1877) focused on various problems of the day.
Richard Wagner was born in 1813 in Liepzig,Germany.Wagner, as a child had a great passion for writing poetry, but his musical interests were left aside until he was eighteen.At eighteen he began lessons with Theodor Weinlig in Leipzig Germany, for a year. His career began in 1833, when he became choral director in Wurzburg Germany. Around this time he began composing and was composing in imitation of German Romantic composers such as Ludwig Van Beethoven, who was his biggest influence at this time.
A man, intoxicated and impoverished, lay on the dirty streets of patriarchal Norway, and as the jeering citizens sauntered by, they could have never guessed that this man, Henrik Ibsen, would be the Prometheus of women’s rights and the creator of the modern play. Having been born in 1828, Ibsen lived through various examples of the subjection of women within the law, such as Great Britain allowing men to lock up and beat their wives “in moderation” (Bray 33). Therefore, Ibsen was known for his realistic style of writing within both poetry and plays, which usually dealt with everyday situations and people (31). Focusing on the rights of women, Ibsen’s trademark was “...looking at these problems without the distortions of romanticism” and often receiving harsh criticism for doing so (31). In an attempt to support his family, Ibsen became a pharmaceutical apprentice, but after three years he abandoned this profession and began writing poetry. After an apprenticeship in the theater, he began writing his own plays, including a drama in verse, Peer Gynt (31). While working and writing in Norway, Ibsen and several social critics observed “...the penalty society pays when only half of its members participate fully as citizens”, deciding to flee Norway in hopes of finding a more accepting social environment (33). Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House, his most famous work about women suffering through the oppressive patriarchal society, while living primarily in Germany and Italy where he “...was exposed to these social norms and tensions to a much greater extent than he would have been had he remained solely in Norway” (32). While Sweden, Norway, and Denmark began to grant legal majority to women, Ibsen understood the legal improvements f...
Durbach, Errol. A. A Doll's House: Ibsen's Myth of Transformation. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Ibsen's Hedda Gabler." Modern Drama 51.1 (2008): 73-83. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
	Joyce literary talent emerged at Belvedere as he began to read the work of European writers and in particular the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). At the age of eighteen, Joyce wrote an essay entitled "Ibsen's New Drama" which was published in the Fortnightly Review. When Ibsen sent him a note of thanks, "the awestruck Joyce resolved to learn Norwegion...
Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in a small fishing village in Denmark. (If a last name ends in sen, the person is probably from Denmark; in son, probably from Sweden). At age fourteen Andersen journeyed to Copenhagen to pursue either an acting or writing career. He auditioned as an opera singer, was a humiliating failure and spent the next three years anguishing in abject poverty.
Psychosocial development explains the stages through which one healthily human should pass from infancy to late adulthood. There are eight stages in psychosocial development; Trust vs. Mistrust, Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt, Initiative vs. Guilt, Industry vs. Inferiority, Identity vs. Role Confusion, Intimacy vs. Isolation, Generativity vs. Stagnation, and Ego Integrity vs. Despair. In each one of these stages, a person confronts and hopefully masters challenges. Erik Erikson is known for creating these stages of psychosocial development.
Yet why does one care if they can prove if a work is by Henrik Ibsen or not? It is simply so that one can better analyze his writing. If the similarities between dramas by Ibsen can be proven, then it is legitimate to say that one could not only explore why those threads are common between the works, but also to discover other play writes that were influenced by Ibsen and picked up this commonality and implemented it similarly in their own works. This is adequate reason to examine what makes an Ibsen drama unique, or at least similar to his other works, and to expound upon such.
Women were seen as the property of men, like their dolls. This idea of a woman being a doll was especially evident in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian dramatist, he became known as the father of modern realistic drama. He became popular because of the ridicule he received for “revealing a women’s need for independence from male authority” (feminist literature).
Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898, thirty-five years after Stanislavski, in Augsburg to a paper-mill managing director. His life was spent moving from country to country, fleeing from Nazi forces and other political pressures. In 1949 Brecht and Helene Weigel founded the Berliner Ensemble, which in 1990 (thirty-four years after Brechts death) was transformed int...
Northam, John. 1965. "Ibsen's Search for the Hero." Ibsen. A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
David Beckham is the one sports star, who not only is a phenominal player, but is probably the most famous sports icon outside just soccer. It is definetely harder to find someone that has not heard of David Beckham, than someone who has. People occasionaly wonder, however; "Why Beckham? Why is he so famous?" The answer might not be very simple, but maybe it is the combination of a great shot, a fantastic cross, his own Adidas shoe, his changing hair-style, his modeling career, his marriage to the Spice Girl Victoria Beckham (formerly Adams), his big mistake against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, his England capitancy and him having belonged to the two largest teams in history that make him so popular among the crowd. When one reads David Beckham's autobiography, David Beckham My Side, something that is surely visible and clear, is his igoistic thoughts and life-style.
The audiences during this period were often shocked by the topics included in some of the play, and if not shocked by the topics, question the topics in a political position, questioning their governments or governing figures ideals. Three of what are considered to be some of the most influential playwrights of the period were Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) who were all notable in the theatrical industry during their time because of their new, shocking and what could be considered revolutionary thoughts and statements made by the characters in their performance
Northram, John. "Ibsen's Search for the Hero." Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Rolf Fjelde. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965. 107-113.
William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are two great authors of their time and are still read by many today. William Shakespeare wrote many plays; one that is more well known is Hamlet. Henrik Ibsen is a not so well known author but wrote a great rival play named A Doll’s House. These two plays were extraordinary for their time and there has been much controversy and debates on which play made the greatest impact to culture and society. These two plays, written in very different time periods, show alternative views on society and how it should be.