He left Norway in 1864, spending the next 27 years in Italy and Germany. While bitter and humiliating personal memories explain, in part, his long exile, it seems also that only by distancing himself from everything he held dear could he devote himself completely to his art. When he left Norway, he looked like a rather dissolute bohemian. In the following years he changed his appearance, habits, and even his handwriting. He became the "Sphinx" he still is to many people--unapproachable, secretive, an avid collector of medals and honors which he wore to protect himself from the real and imagined hostility of others. Long before he returned home in 1891, he had become the world's most famous dramatist.
Early Plays
For all its youthful excesses, Catiline (1850), his first play, is remarkably Ibsenian. The theme, as Ibsen wrote later, is the discrepancy between ability and aspiration, which he called "mankind's and the individual's tragedy and comedy at the same time." Like the characters in many of Ibsen's later plays, Catiline is torn between two women who represent conflicting forces in himself: one of them embodies domestic virtues, the other his calling and, significantly, his death.
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