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Henrik Ibsen wrote twenty-six plays and spent twenty-seven years refusing to live in the country he wrote them about. Ghosts had its first performance in Chicago because no European theatre would touch it. Hedda Gabler opened in Munich, The Master Builder in Berlin, John Gabriel Borkman in Helsinki. This page has every play in order, what each one is, which of the famous first performances were not performances at all, and where to start if you have only ever been made to read A Doll’s House at school.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 plays in full · Classics · 1850–1899 · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Henrik Ibsen wrote twenty-six plays between 1850 and 1899, plus one collection of poems. The early ones are in verse and draw on Norse saga and Norwegian history; the last twelve are in prose, set in living rooms, and are the ones the world still performs. He wrote almost all of the famous ones abroad, and most of them opened outside Norway. All fourteen major plays, and what each one is → If you are starting, start with The Wild Duck (1884) rather than the one you were given at school.
Where to Start with Henrik Ibsen
If you have never read him
→ The Wild Duck (1884). Not the obvious choice, and the right one. It is the play where he turns on his own earlier heroes and asks what happens when someone arrives to tell a family the truth about itself.
If you only know A Doll’s House from school
→ Read Ghosts (1881) next. It is the play he wrote when the critics told him Nora should have stayed, and it is what happens to the woman who does.
If you want the one about a person rather than a society
→ Hedda Gabler (1890). No message, no argument, no reformer. Just a woman with nothing to do and a pair of pistols, and four acts of everyone misreading her.
If you want the poetry
→ Peer Gynt (1867), which he wrote in Italy and never expected to see staged. Trolls, a button moulder, and the longest argument with himself he ever had. Brand (1866) is its severe twin.
If you want the late, strange ones
→ The Master Builder (1892) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), which he subtitled A Dramatic Epilogue. Both are about old men looking at what their work cost other people.
If you are choosing a translation
→ For reading, look for a recent one by a translator who has worked with a theatre — the Victorian versions are free everywhere online and are the reason people think Ibsen is stiff. He is not stiff in Norwegian.
The 14 Essential Ibsen Plays, in Order
Brand
A priest who will accept nothing less than everything, from himself and from everyone near him, and who loses his child, his mother and his wife to that principle. Ibsen wrote it in Italy in 1865, in his first year away from Norway, and it made him famous at home almost overnight. It was written to be read rather than performed, and the full staging came much later.
The hardest play on this page and the one that explains the rest. Everything Ibsen wrote afterwards is in some sense an argument with Brand, including the plays where nobody demands anything of anyone.
— LisannePeer Gynt
A boastful young man from a Norwegian valley runs away from everything he has ever started — a wedding, a child, a woman who waits for him for decades — and spends a lifetime becoming a series of people who are not him. Trolls in the mountains, slave-trading in Africa, and a button moulder at the end who wants to melt him down because he was never sufficiently anything.
The one to read aloud. Grieg’s music has made it sound like a folk tale, and it is much nastier and much funnier than that. If you have only heard Morning Mood, you have the wrong idea entirely.
— LisannePillars of Society
A shipowner and civic pillar has built his standing on a lie and on a ship he knows is unseaworthy. The first of the twelve modern prose plays, and the moment Ibsen stops writing about Vikings and kings and starts writing about the people who ran the towns he grew up in.
Read it for the hinge rather than the play. It is the least performed of the late twelve and the one where you can watch him finding the room, the family and the secret that he will use for the next twenty-two years.
— LisanneA Doll's House
Nora Helmer forged a signature to save her husband’s life and has spent eight years paying the debt in secret. When he finds out, he is not grateful. The final scene, in which she leaves, caused such an outcry that a German actress refused to play it, and Ibsen wrote her an alternative ending in which Nora stays — then called it a barbaric outrage.
The play whose reputation gets in the way of itself. Read it slowly and the surprise is not the door at the end but how much of the last act is Torvald talking. It is on the UNESCO Memory of the World register, which almost no play is.
— LisanneGhosts
Helene Alving has spent her life protecting the reputation of a husband who did not deserve it, and the play takes place on the day the consequences arrive. Inherited disease, a son, a housemaid and a clergyman. Every European theatre refused it, and the first performance was given in Chicago by a Danish-Norwegian company for Scandinavian immigrants.
The answer to everyone who told him Nora should have stayed for the children’s sake. He wrote this one within two years, and it is the angriest thing he ever did.
— LisanneAn Enemy of the People
A doctor discovers that the spa baths his town depends on are contaminated, and assumes that telling everyone will be the end of the matter. It is the beginning of it. Written immediately after the reception of Ghosts, which is not a coincidence.
The most quoted and the most misread. Dr Stockmann is right about the water and he is also insufferable, and productions that make him a straightforward hero lose the play.
— LisanneThe Wild Duck
Gregers Werle arrives to tell his old friend’s family the truth about the marriage they are living inside, in the belief that people are better off knowing. In the attic there is a wounded wild duck that the daughter keeps. The play is often called the first modern tragedy, and it is funnier than that makes it sound, right up to the point where it is not.
My pick to start with. After three plays about telling the truth, Ibsen writes one about what happens when somebody does — and the answer is not what his earlier heroes assumed.
— LisanneRosmersholm
A widowed landowner, the woman living in his house, and a drowned wife whose presence neither will name. Politics and guilt in a house where everyone speaks carefully. Freud wrote about Rebecca West; so has almost everyone since.
The least showy of the late plays and the favourite of people who have read all of them. Nothing happens loudly and almost nothing is said directly, and it is devastating.
— LisanneThe Lady from the Sea
Ellida Wangel, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter married to a doctor, is held by a promise she made years ago to a sailor who has now come back for her. The only one of the late plays that ends well, which has made critics suspicious of it for a century.
The odd one out, and worth reading precisely for that. Her husband’s solution in the last act — that she must be free to choose, and that this is what changes the choice — is the most generous thing in Ibsen.
— LisanneHedda Gabler
A general’s daughter, six months married to an academic she does not respect, with her father’s pistols in the house and nothing whatever to do. Ibsen gives her no cause, no speech and no explanation, which is why she has been played several thousand different ways. He attended the Munich premiere and stayed backstage.
The play with no argument in it, by the writer everyone thinks writes arguments. If you find the others preachy, this is the one that will change your mind.
— LisanneThe Master Builder
An architect who has climbed over other people to get where he is, afraid of heights and of the young, and a girl who arrives to collect on a promise he may or may not have made her ten years before. He climbs the tower at the end.
The first of the last four, and the one where the realism starts letting go at the edges. Read it after you know the others, when you can hear how much of it is Ibsen talking about Ibsen.
— LisanneLittle Eyolf
A husband and wife lose their disabled son in the opening act, and the rest of the play is the two of them working out what each of them actually wanted. The London performance in December 1894 is often listed as the premiere; it was a copyright formality with two paying spectators.
The most uncomfortable play here, and short. The scene where they tell each other the truth about their marriage in Act Two is as close to unbearable as he gets.
— LisanneJohn Gabriel Borkman
A disgraced banker has spent eight years pacing the room above his wife’s head, waiting for the delegation that will call him back to public life. Downstairs, his wife and her twin sister are fighting over his son. Nobody is coming.
The coldest of the four last plays. Three people who have wasted their lives in the same house and will not admit it, and then a walk out into the snow.
— LisanneWhen We Dead Awaken
A famous sculptor at a mountain hotel meets the woman who modelled for the masterpiece that made him, and who has been dead in every sense since. His last play, and he called it an epilogue on the title page. Three months later he had the first of the strokes that ended his writing life.
Not the place to start and the place to finish. It is an old man’s account of what it costs other people when someone decides their work matters more than their life, and he knew exactly whose account it was.
— LisanneAll 27 Ibsen Works, by Form
Twenty-seven works: twenty-six plays and one book of poems. They are grouped by form rather than by date because the break between the verse plays and the prose plays is the one real division in his career, and it happens at a single title — The League of Youth, 1869, his first play in ordinary spoken prose. Where a play was written, published and first performed in three different years, all three are given rather than one.
Open a form to see the titles.
The twelve modern prose plays
12
Pillars of Society 1877
Samfundets støtter
A Doll's House 1879
Et dukkehjem
Ghosts 1881
Gengangere
An Enemy of the People 1882
En folkefiende
The Wild Duck 1884
Vildanden
Rosmersholm 1886
Rosmersholm
The Lady from the Sea 1888
Fruen fra havet
Hedda Gabler 1890
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder 1892
Bygmester Solness
Little Eyolf 1894
Lille Eyolf
John Gabriel Borkman 1896
John Gabriel Borkman
When We Dead Awaken 1899
Når vi døde vågner
The early verse and historical plays
14
Catiline 1850
Catilina · published under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme · not staged until 1881
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The Burial Mound 1850
Kjæmpehøjen · the first Ibsen play ever staged, Christiania, 26 September 1850
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Norma, or A Politician’s Love 1851
an eight-page anonymous opera parody in a satirical magazine, not staged until 1994
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St John's Night 1853
Sancthansnatten · premiered in Bergen, 2 January 1853, and never admitted to his collected works
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Lady Inger of Østråt 1855
Fru Inger til Østeraad · premiered Bergen 1855, published 1857
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The Feast at Solhaug 1856
Gildet paa Solhoug · his first public success
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Olaf Liljekrans 1857
Olaf Liljekrans · premiered Bergen, 2 January 1857; not published in his lifetime
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The Vikings at Helgeland 1858
Hærmændene paa Helgeland
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Love's Comedy 1862
Kjærlighedens Komedie · denounced as immoral; not staged for eleven years
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The Pretenders 1863
Kongs-Emnerne
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Brand 1866
Brand · a dramatic poem
Peer Gynt 1867
Peer Gynt
The League of Youth 1869
De unges Forbund · his first play in colloquial prose
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Emperor and Galilean 1873
Kejser og Galilæer · his longest play, two parts of five acts
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Poetry
1
Digte (Poems) 1871
his only collection of poems, containing work written 1847–1870, including Terje Vigen; expanded in 1875
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Quick facts about Henrik Ibsen
- Born
- 20 March 1828, Skien, Norway
- Died
- 23 May 1906, Kristiania, now Oslo, aged 78
- Childhood
- His father’s fortunes collapsed in the mid-1830s, when Ibsen was seven or eight
- First job
- Apothecary’s apprentice in Grimstad, 1843 to 1850, from the age of fifteen
- Theatre in Bergen
- Det norske Theater, 1851 to 1857 — involved in more than 145 productions
- Theatre in Kristiania
- Kristiania Norske Theater, 1857 until it went bankrupt in 1862
- Married
- Suzannah Daae Thoresen, 18 June 1858
- Son
- Sigurd Ibsen, born 1859, later a government minister
- Exile
- Twenty-seven years abroad, 1864 to 1891 — Rome, then Dresden, then Munich
- Returned
- To Kristiania in 1891, where he spent his last fifteen years
- Plays
- Twenty-six, plus one collection of poems
- The turn to prose
- The League of Youth, 1869 — everything before it is verse or history
- Last play
- When We Dead Awaken, 1899, subtitled A Dramatic Epilogue
- End of writing
- A stroke on 15 March 1900, followed by others; he never wrote again
- UNESCO
- A Doll’s House was inscribed on the Memory of the World register in 2001
- Translated into
- 78 languages, according to the Centre for Ibsen Studies
The Plays That Did Not Premiere in Norway, and the Ones That Never Premiered at All
Line up the first performances of Ibsen’s late plays and Norway barely appears. Pillars of Society opened in Odense. Ghosts opened in Chicago, in Danish, played by a Danish-Norwegian company for Scandinavian immigrants, because no European theatre would stage it. Hedda Gabler opened in Munich, The Master Builder and Little Eyolf in Berlin, Emperor and Galilean in Leipzig, John Gabriel Borkman in Helsinki at two theatres on the same day. The Lady from the Sea opened in Kristiania and Weimar simultaneously.
He was not in Norway either. From 1864 to 1891 — twenty-seven years, the whole of the work he is remembered for — he lived in Rome, Dresden and Munich, and wrote about Norwegian small towns from a distance of two thousand kilometres. A Doll’s House was written in Italy.
Then there is the part that most lists get wrong. Two of the “first performances” in circulation were not performances in any ordinary sense. English law of the period required that a play be performed before it could be copyrighted, so publishers staged readings that existed purely to secure the rights. The Haymarket event for Little Eyolf in December 1894 was one of these: amateurs, and two paying spectators. The real premiere was in Berlin five weeks later. The same thing happened with When We Dead Awaken. You will still find both listed as London premieres.
A third thing gets flattened. The twelve prose plays are routinely described as a cycle that Ibsen planned as a single work. That reading comes from the critic Brian Johnston, in 1975, and it is a good reading; it is not a statement by Ibsen. What Ibsen did do is print the words A Dramatic Epilogue under the title of the last one, which implies something finished, and that much is on the title page.
And one play is missing from his own collected works. St John’s Night failed at its Bergen premiere in January 1853 and Ibsen never let it back in. It was not staged again for a hundred and twenty-five years. If a bibliography gives you twenty-five plays rather than twenty-six, that is usually the one it has quietly dropped, following his wishes rather than the record.
Frequently asked questions about Henrik Ibsen’s plays
How many plays did Henrik Ibsen write?
Twenty-six, published between 1850 and 1899, plus one collection of poems, Digte (1871). Some lists give twenty-five because they leave out St John’s Night (1853), which Ibsen refused to include in his own collected works after it failed, and some give more by counting unfinished drafts such as The Grouse in Justedal.
What are Henrik Ibsen's plays in order?
Catiline (1850), The Burial Mound (1850), Norma (1851), St John’s Night (1853), Lady Inger of Østråt (1855), The Feast at Solhaug (1856), Olaf Liljekrans (1857), The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), Love’s Comedy (1862), The Pretenders (1863), Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), The League of Youth (1869), Emperor and Galilean (1873), Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).
Which Ibsen play should I read first?
The Wild Duck (1884). It is the one where he questions his own earlier certainties, it is the funniest until it stops being funny, and it does not come with the weight of expectation that A Doll’s House now carries. If you want the famous one anyway, read Ghosts straight afterwards.
What are the twelve prose plays?
Pillars of Society (1877) through When We Dead Awaken (1899): the twelve modern plays in ordinary speech, set in contemporary rooms. They are often called a cycle, which is a critic’s reading rather than Ibsen’s own description — though he did subtitle the last one A Dramatic Epilogue.
Why did Ghosts premiere in Chicago?
Because no European theatre would stage it. The play deals with inherited syphilis, incest and euthanasia, and the outcry on publication in December 1881 was severe enough that the first performance, in May 1882, was given by a Danish-Norwegian touring company in Chicago, in Danish, for Scandinavian immigrants.
Does A Doll's House have two endings?
Yes, and Ibsen wrote the second one himself. A German actress refused to play a mother who leaves her children, so he supplied an alternative in which Nora sees the children and collapses, and stays. It was first played in Flensburg in February 1880. He described it afterwards as a barbaric outrage and a disgrace to the original.
Who was Henrik Ibsen?
A Norwegian playwright and poet, born 20 March 1828 in Skien and died 23 May 1906 in Kristiania, now Oslo. He ran theatres in Bergen and Kristiania, spent twenty-seven years living abroad, and wrote the plays that invented modern realist drama. He is widely described as the most performed playwright in the world after Shakespeare.
Why did Ibsen live outside Norway?
He left in April 1864, after the failure of the theatre he ran in Kristiania and in disgust at Norway and Sweden staying out of the war over Schleswig. He went to Rome, then Dresden in 1868, then Munich in 1875, and did not move home until 1891 — twenty-seven years, which covers almost every play he is now known for.
What is Peer Gynt about?
A young Norwegian braggart who spends his life avoiding becoming anyone in particular: he steals a bride, meets trolls, makes a fortune, loses it, and is met at the end by a button moulder who wants to melt him down because he was never sufficiently himself to be worth keeping. Written in verse in Italy in 1867 and not intended for the stage.
Which Ibsen play is the most performed?
A Doll’s House. In 2006, the centenary of his death, it was the most performed play in the world that year, and in 2001 it was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — a distinction almost no other play holds.
What is the difference between the early and the late Ibsen?
Verse and prose. Everything up to 1867 is in verse or drawn from Norse saga and Norwegian history. The League of Youth (1869) is the first play written in ordinary colloquial prose, and everything after it is set in the present day, in rooms, among people who could have been in the audience.
Did Ibsen write anything other than plays?
One book of poems, Digte, published on 3 May 1871 and expanded in 1875. It contains work written between 1847 and 1870, including the long narrative poem Terje Vigen. He also wrote speeches, articles and a large correspondence, but Digte is his only other book.
Which Ibsen translation should I read?
Prefer a recent translation made for or with a theatre. The nineteenth-century English versions are out of copyright and therefore everywhere, and they are the main reason English readers think Ibsen sounds stiff and formal. He does not sound like that in Norwegian.
When did Ibsen stop writing?
When We Dead Awaken was published in December 1899. He had a stroke on 15 March 1900 that left him with paralysis and aphasia, and further strokes followed. He wrote nothing more and died on 23 May 1906.
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Footnotes
- Henrik Ibsens skrifter — the scholarly critical edition, University of Oslo
- Henrik Ibsen — Wikipedia
- Henrik Ibsen — Store norske leksikon
- Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House — UNESCO Memory of the World
- Henrik Ibsen — Britannica
- Life and Works — Ibsen Society of America
- On Ibsen’s work — Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo
Bibliography last verified 19 September 2026. Two premiere dates in wide circulation are disputed and are therefore not given here as fact: the first full staging of Brand, which sources date to either 1867 or 1885, and the first performance of When We Dead Awaken. The University of Oslo’s IbsenStage database is the place to settle both.
Nothing here was suggested by a machine.
I read these myself,
and the reasons are on the page.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”
— Dr Stockmann, in An Enemy of the People, 1882
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