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Volume 3: A blow of destiny, the king appears Chapter 17: The crumbling, Victorian era

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    Henrik Johann Ibsen (1828©¤1906), born in Schien, Norway, was a Norwegian playwright with far-reaching influence and is considered the founder of modern realist drama.

    Many of his plays were considered scandalous at the time, as Victorian family values ??and etiquette were the standard in society, and any question or challenge to these standards was considered immoral and abhorrent.

    Ibsen's works show the actual situation below the surface, and the society at that time did not want to see this actual phenomenon.

    Ibsen looked at the reality of life with an unsparing eye and raised new moral questions. From this, he created modern drama.

    ¡°Before him, the play was always a moral didactic, with its noble protagonist fighting against the forces of darkness.  Every play should have a proper ending, good people should have a good ending, and immoral people should be punished.

    Ibsen turned this template on its head, challenging the beliefs of the day and destroying the illusions of his audience.

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

    His hometown is a small port on the coast of Norway that mainly exports timber.  Soon after his birth his family's situation began to deteriorate.  His mother sought solace in religion, while his father fell into a severe depression.

    The characters in Ibsen's works are often similar to his parents, and his plots are often related to financial difficulties.

    With his family in decline, Ibsen left his parents at the age of 15. At the age of 16, he went to the small town of Grimstad to work as a pharmacy apprentice and began to write plays.

    When he was young, he was influenced by the European bourgeois democratic revolution and participated in the Norwegian national independence movement.

    In 1848, he began to write poems and plays. The first play was the three-act poetic drama "Catilene".

    In 1850, Ibsen went to Oslo to apply for university.  But he was not admitted. He completed his first play in the same year. He was only 22 years old at the time, but this play was not staged. His first staged play was "The Cemetery" in the same year, but this play did not receive much  Notice.  Although he did not write again for several years, he did not give up writing plays.

    In 1851, he was recommended to join the Bergen Theater as playwright and stage director, starting his career as a professional dramatist.

    ??While he was working in the Norwegian Theater.  There he became a writer, director and producer and participated in the production of 145 plays.

    Although he did not write his own plays during this period, he gained a lot of practical experience from his work, which later played a great role in his plays.

    In 1857, he returned to Oslo.  His financial situation was very bad at that 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 hometown for the next 27 years.  When he returned to Norway, he was already a controversial but famous playwright.

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

    These successes gave him confidence, and he began to add more and more of his own trust and judgment to his plays.  He calls this the drama of thought.

    His subsequent series of plays are known as his golden age.  His authority continued to grow, and others became increasingly at the center of debates about European drama.

    1906.  Died in Oslo.

    Ibsen¡¯s drama creation can be roughly divided into three periods.  Most of his early plays were adapted from ancient Norwegian heroic legends, ballads and histories, and were romantic dramas rich in national color.

    He has adapted many dramas based on ancient Norwegian heroic legends and medieval folk creations, such as "Ketilian", "Lady Inge", "Olav Lilekron", "The Pretender", etc.

    "Lady Inge" describes the story of Mrs. Inge, a heroine from northern Norway in the sixteenth century.  "The Pretender" is about Norway's struggle from feudal separatism to national reunification. The work promotes national unity by praising ancient heroes, inspires people's patriotic enthusiasm, and advocates Norwegian national drama.

    Later, "Brand" and "Pierre Gynt" began to shift towards realism.

    The middle period of creation was from about 1869 to 1890.  After the 1870s, the Paris Commune Revolution caused intensification of social conflicts in Europe.  This deepened Ibsen's understanding of capitalist society and system.

    He shifted his attention from medieval folklore to current real life aspects.  His creations shifted from romanticism to realism.

    He often uses daily life as material to analyze social problems from many aspects, exposing and criticizing the various shortcomings of bourgeois society, touching law, religion, morality and even the country., political parties, institutions and other fields.  That¡¯s why people call it a social issue drama.

    Important plays include "Youth League", "Pillars of Society", "A Doll's House", "Ghosts", "Enemy of the People", etc.  In 1891, when Ibsen was sixty-three years old, he returned to his motherland after a long absence and spent his later years in Oslo. His late creations were not as passionate and sharp as his mid-term creations, but seemed cold and profound. He turned to psychological description and psychoanalysis, and also had pessimism.  and symbolism, and his works include "The Wild Duck" and "The Master of Architecture".

    On Ibsen¡¯s seventieth birthday in 1898, the Norwegian cultural community gathered to celebrate his birthday, and the Norwegian National Theater erected a bronze statue in his honor.

    Ibsen wrote a total of twenty-six plays and many poems in his life.  His plays had a profound and widespread impact on the development of modern drama, so he is known as the father of modern drama.

    Work review: Ibsen's 1879 "A Doll's House" is a sharp criticism of the roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.

    His protagonist, Nora, leaves her husband in search of a wider world after realizing that he is not the noble figure she always thought him to be.

    Her role in this 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 her own mailbox key.  To save her husband's life, she falsely signed her father's name on the IOU, for which she was blackmailed.

    Her husband wants to divorce her because the only thing that matters to her husband is his own reputation, not Nora's love for him.

    After "A Doll's House" was staged, it aroused criticism and criticism from bourgeois society.  Especially Nora's running away has attracted a lot of criticism, thinking that Nora is not a woman and so on.

    Later, the person who complained to Nora withdrew the blackmail. In Victoria's play, this could be the solution to all problems, but it was already too late for Ibsen and Nora, and they could not return.

    Nora¡¯s illusions were shattered, and she decided to leave her husband and children, and her family of dolls, to discover what was real and what was not.  to the people at that time.  This is a scandal.  Divorce is a very shameful thing, and it is completely unacceptable to portray it this way.

    Some theaters refused to perform the play, and Ibsen was forced to write a less dark ending.  This made him very angry.  Finally at the last minute before the premiere he proposed a change.

    1881¡¯s The Ghost is another critique of Victorian morality.  A widow confessed the sins of her marriage to her pastor, whom her pastor had advised her to marry despite his unfaithfulness.  She believed that her love could influence her lover, so she listened to her pastor and married her lover.  But she didn't get what she hoped for.

    Until his death, he continued to have relationships with other women.  The result was that their children contracted syphilis.  At that time, even mentioning this venereal disease was already a scandal, but Ibsen went against the convention of the time and allowed a very moral person according to the moral concepts of the time not only not to be protected by this morality, but also to become a victim. This is  Even more incredible.

    She did not get the noble life she should have according to the Victorian moral values, although she fulfilled her obligations.  These ideal ethics are ghosts of the past.  They are still persecuting people today.

    At this time, the social criticism of Ibsen reached its peak.  But society itself has lost control of its masses.  Many people did not live Victoria's ideal life.  They wanted to see Ibsen's plays because they showed reality they already knew.  Social trends have changed.

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

    The central idea of ????this play is that individuals can sometimes be more right than the crowd.  The public is ignorant and like lambs in this drama.

    Ibsen challenged the Victorians' belief in society as a noble, trustworthy institution.

    The protagonist is a doctor and a pillar of society.  The town where he lived was a health resort, the centerpiece of which was the town's public baths.

    The protagonist discovers that the water in the bathhouse is contaminated by a local tannery.  He hopes to become a local hero when he makes his discovery public.  Because he saved the reputation of the town and prevented the convalescent guests from being infected.  But on the contrary, he was regarded by the locals as an enemy of the people.  Later, stones were even thrown at his home.

    Finally he was forced to leave the town.  For the audience, the small town andEveryone faces an obvious disaster, but the local society is unwilling to face the facts.

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

    Ibsen was a man who opposed idolatry, and he had no mercy even for the ideas of people of his own political persuasions.

    "The Wild Duck" in 1884 is regarded by many as Ibsen's best work, and it is also Ibsen's most complex work.  In this play, Grieg returns to his hometown after many years away and meets his childhood friend Black Armagh.

    Grieg persisted in his search for truth, or in his own words the call to truth.  As the play progresses he discovers many secrets behind his friends' happy families, including the fact that his own father had a child with his maid Gina, and to cover up this fact, his father married Gina.  Black Amalance came to legitimize the child.

    ¡°In addition, another man was wrongly sentenced to prison because of a crime his father committed.  Heima only thinks about his inventions all day long. His wife earns all his family's income.

    Ibsen used a device of irony: although Grieg insisted on the truth, he never directly said what he wanted to say, but always implied that no one understood what he was saying until the climax of the play.

    Black Arma ignored Grieg's hints and secret words until he realized the truth: his daughter Hedwig was not his own child.

    Influenced by Grieg, he abandoned the child in order to stick to the truth.  Grieg realizes that he has done something wrong and decides to make amends for his mistake, suggesting that Hedwig sacrifice her pet, a wounded wild goose, to prove her love to Black Arma.

    Hedwig was the only one among all the characters who realized that Grieg usually said what he wanted to say in a suggestive way. She did not realize that this time Grieg directly said what he meant. She tried to find out what Grieg was saying.  What exactly did Ge suggest her to do, and in the end she decided to sacrifice herself to prove her love.

    Heima and Grieg realized that sometimes the truth is intolerable to the human heart, but their realization came too late.

    Ibsen's most performed play may be "Hedda and Gabler" in 1890, in which the heroine is regarded as the most difficult and perfect role so far. She is the same as Nana in "A Doll's House"  There are some similarities.

    Ibsen completely changed the rules of playwriting.  His realism is the basis for many of the plays we see in theater today.  Starting from Ibsen, the challenge to 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 the Norway at this time was no longer the same Norway as when he left.  In fact, he played an important role in changing this society.  The Victorian era was already crumbling, and modern society had arrived not just in the theatre, but in social life in general.
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