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Why did Henrik Ibsen leave Norway in 1864?
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Henrik Ibsen
Norwegian dramatist and poet Henrik Ibsen.
Henrik Ibsen left Norway in 1864 primarily because his career as a stage writer in his home country had effectively come to an end.1
By that time, the theatre in Christiania where he worked had gone bankrupt. Despite his efforts to create a "national drama," his earlier plays were largely unsuccessful, and he found himself struggling to reconcile the demands of the theatre with his own artistic vision. Following the failure of his career in the Norwegian theatre, Ibsen moved abroad, where he would go on to write most of his best work over the next 27 years.21