Henrik IbsenHenrik Ibsen was born in Skien, Norway on March 20, 1828. When he was eight years old, his father went bankrupt. This event made a deep impression on him. After the bankruptcy, his family moved to a small farm north of the city where they lived in poverty. Henrik was forced to attend a small local school. He received a below-average education. In 1843 the family returned to the city. Unfortunately they were still poor. Ibsen came from a very dysfunctional family. His overbearing father was an alcoholic and found solace in alcohol. Her quiet mother found solace in religion. He used them as models for his plays. The fusion of a domineering husband and a submissive wife appeared in his comedies Brand, A Doll's House and Ghosts. Hjalmar Ekdal's bitter character in The Wild Duck was based on Ibsen's father. When he was sixteen, he moved to Grimstad to work for a pharmacist. He wanted to become a doctor, but accepted the idea after failing Greek and Mathematics! University entrance exams. Medicine was not his only ambition. He also wanted to become a painter. In 1850 Ibsen entered the first of his three writing periods. His Romantic period ran from 1850 to 1873. The greatest works of this period are Brand and Peer Gynt. Most of the plays he wrote in these years were romantic historical dramas. Lady Inger of Ostraat was a romantic drama with intrigue. The Vikings of Helgeland were a simple and sad tragedy. The last comedy of the Romantic period was Emperor and Galileo. It is similar to Ibsen's other play, Catiline, because it shows his impatience with traditional attitudes and values. In both plays he showed sympathy for historical figures famous for being rebellious. Ibsen became stage manager and playwright of the National Theater in Bergen in 1851. He worked there for six years. In 1857 he moved to Christiania (Oslo), where he became director of the Norwegian Theatre. He neglected both writing and theater. He immersed himself in social life with his literary friends and drank heavily. In 1858, Ibsen married Suzannah Thoresen, with whom he had a son, Sigurd Ibsen. It was a marriage as often misunderstood as the marriages of Ibsen's plays. At the age of thirty, Ibsen saw his first performances of Shakespeare in Copenhagen and Dresden. Shakespeare's work convinced Ibsen that serious drama must strive for psychological truth and be based on the characters and conflicts of humanity. Ibsen and