Correct Answer: C) Norway

Explanation: Ibsen was born in the small coastal town of Skien, Norway, a setting that would inform the provincial and often restrictive societies depicted in his plays.

Correct Answer: D) 27 years

Explanation: Feeling unappreciated in his home country, Ibsen left Norway in 1864 and spent 27 years living primarily in Italy and Germany, where he wrote most of his major works.

Correct Answer: C) An apothecary’s apprentice

Explanation: At the age of 15, Ibsen moved to the town of Grimstad to work as an apothecary’s (pharmacist’s) apprentice, a period of poverty and isolation during which he began writing.

Correct Answer: C) Realism

Explanation: His plays moved away from the artificial plots and stock characters of melodrama, focusing instead on the psychological and social realities of contemporary middle-class life.

Correct Answer: B) Early Romantic/Historical plays, middle Social Realism plays, and late Symbolist plays

Explanation: This is the standard critical division of his career, starting with verse dramas like *Peer Gynt*, moving to the famous “problem plays” like *A Doll’s House*, and ending with introspective works like *The Master Builder*.

Correct Answer: B) George Bernard Shaw

Explanation: Shaw was Ibsen’s greatest advocate in the English-speaking world, celebrating him as a writer of social ideas who had brought serious thought back to the theatre.

Correct Answer: C) Nora Helmer

Explanation: Nora Helmer’s journey from a seemingly childlike wife to an independent woman forms the core of the play.

Correct Answer: C) She forged her father’s signature to illegally borrow money.

Explanation: She borrowed the money to fund a trip to Italy that was necessary to save Torvald’s life, an act of love that was illegal for a woman at the time.

Correct Answer: A) “My little lark” and “my little squirrel”

Explanation: These pet names, along with him forbidding her from eating macaroons, establish their unequal relationship and his treatment of her as a possession or a child.

Correct Answer: B) Nils Krogstad

Explanation: Krogstad, a disgraced bank employee, is the one who originally lent Nora the money and threatens to expose her if she does not secure his position at Torvald’s bank.

Correct Answer: B) That he will take all the blame upon himself to protect her.

Explanation: She believes in the fairytale ideal that her husband’s love is so great that he would sacrifice his own honor and reputation to save hers. His selfish and furious reaction shatters this illusion.

Correct Answer: C) The Tarantella

Explanation: The frantic, almost violent performance of the tarantella symbolizes Nora’s inner turmoil and desperation. The dance was traditionally believed to ward off the poison of a tarantula’s bite.

Correct Answer: C) A door slamming shut

Explanation: Nora’s exit, punctuated by “the sound of a door slamming,” became a symbol of female liberation and was heard around the world, marking a revolutionary moment in theatre history.

Correct Answer: C) Nora is forced to stay after Torvald makes her look at her sleeping children.

Explanation: The leading German actress refused to play a woman who would abandon her children. Ibsen reluctantly wrote a new ending, which he later called a “barbaric outrage,” where Nora collapses, unable to leave.

Correct Answer: B) The “ghosts” of past sins, dead ideas, and social conventions that haunt the living

Explanation: Mrs. Alving explains that she is haunted by “dead ideas and all sorts of old dead beliefs,” which are the true “ghosts” of the play, representing the inescapable influence of the past.

Correct Answer: D) Mrs. Helene Alving

Explanation: Mrs. Alving is the central figure, a widow who has spent her life maintaining a lie about her dissolute husband and must now face the tragic consequences.

Correct Answer: C) Congenital Syphilis

Explanation: Oswald has inherited syphilis from his father, Captain Alving. The play’s direct confrontation with venereal disease was a primary reason for the immense scandal and outrage it caused.

Correct Answer: B) Corrupt and hypocritical conventional morality

Explanation: It was Pastor Manders who convinced Mrs. Alving to return to her cheating husband for the sake of “duty” and appearances. He is blind to the human suffering caused by his rigid beliefs.

Correct Answer: C) It burns down.

Explanation: The uninsured orphanage, built to whitewash Captain Alving’s reputation, burns to the ground in a moment of powerful irony, symbolizing the impossibility of covering up the sins of the past.

Correct Answer: C) To help him end his own life

Explanation: Oswald, terrified of becoming a helpless invalid, makes his mother promise to euthanize him with morphine pills if the final stage of his illness begins. The play ends as he succumbs, leaving her with the pills and an impossible choice.

Correct Answer: C) She is the illegitimate daughter of Captain Alving.

Explanation: This revelation means that she is Oswald’s half-sister, which adds a layer of incestuous horror to their flirtation.

Correct Answer: A) It is her maiden name from her aristocratic father, General Gabler.

Explanation: Ibsen’s title, *Hedda Gabler* instead of *Hedda Tesman*, emphasizes that she sees herself as her father’s daughter, an aristocrat, rather than as her husband’s wife, a bourgeois academic.

Correct Answer: C) Jörgen Tesman

Explanation: Hedda has married the boring and conventional Jörgen Tesman out of social desperation, and she is deeply bored by him and his middle-class values.

Correct Answer: C) Her father’s pistols

Explanation: The dueling pistols are a constant presence, symbolizing Hedda’s inherited aristocratic and masculine identity, her violent frustrations, and her ultimate means of escape.

Correct Answer: B) Tesman’s main academic rival and Hedda’s former intellectual companion

Explanation: Løvborg is a brilliant but unstable writer whom Hedda admires for his rebellious spirit. His reappearance disrupts Hedda’s tedious life.

Correct Answer: C) She burns it in the stove.

Explanation: In an act of jealous rage and a desire to control him, Hedda destroys the manuscript, which she refers to as her and Thea Elvsted’s “child,” committing an act of spiritual murder.

Correct Answer: C) Commit suicide “beautifully”

Explanation: She has a romantic, aestheticized vision of a courageous, beautiful death with “vine leaves in his hair.” She wants to vicariously experience this defiant act through him.

Correct Answer: D) He recognizes the pistol Løvborg used to kill himself and can expose her for her role in his death.

Explanation: Brack’s knowledge gives him power over Hedda, threatening her with a public scandal. This loss of freedom and control is the final trigger for her suicide.

Correct Answer: C) “People don’t do such things!”

Explanation: Brack’s final line is a moment of supreme irony. A man who has seen and participated in society’s sordid underbelly is genuinely shocked by an act that, for all its horror, is an expression of absolute individual will—something he cannot comprehend.

Correct Answer: C) *Peer Gynt*

Explanation: Peer’s motto is to be “to thyself… enough,” leading him on a sprawling journey where he avoids becoming his true self. At the end of his life, the Button-Molder threatens to melt him down because he has been neither a great sinner nor a great saint, just a “nobody.”

Correct Answer: B) “All or Nothing.”

Explanation: Brand is an uncompromising priest who demands absolute willpower and sacrifice from himself and everyone around him, leading to tragic consequences for his family.

Correct Answer: B) A mysterious, formless, and invisible obstacle that tells Peer to “go round”

Explanation: The Boyg is a symbol of the compromising, evasive spirit that prevents one from facing life’s challenges directly. Peer’s willingness to “go round” is his defining flaw.

Correct Answer: C) A symbol of pure, steadfast, and waiting love

Explanation: Solveig waits a lifetime for Peer to return. In the end, it is her faith and love that offer him a final chance at redemption, as she claims his “true self” has existed all along in her heart.

Correct Answer: B) The idea that he has no central core or “self”

Explanation: As he peels away layer after layer of the roles he has played in his life (prospector, prophet, historian), he finds that, like an onion, there is nothing at the center.

Correct Answer: B) *The Pretenders*

Explanation: This historical tragedy explores the theme of the “kingly thought” and the nature of vocation, contrasting the confident King Haakon with the doubting and tormented Earl Skule.

Correct Answer: C) “The life-lie” (livsløgnen)

Explanation: The character Dr. Relling argues that most people need a “life-lie” or a sustaining illusion to survive the harshness of reality. When Gregers Werle exposes this lie, the result is tragedy.

Correct Answer: B) The Ekdal family itself—wounded and living in a world of illusion

Explanation: Just as the duck was shot by Old Werle and now lives in a fake attic-forest, so too have the Ekdals been wounded by him and retreated into a world of make-believe to cope.

Correct Answer: B) That the town’s prosperous new baths are contaminated

Explanation: Dr. Stockmann discovers the spa waters are poisoned by a local tannery, but the town, whose economy depends on the baths, turns against him for speaking this inconvenient truth.

Correct Answer: C) stands most alone.

Explanation: This is Ibsen’s powerful statement on individualism and the moral courage required to defy the “compact liberal majority.”

Correct Answer: C) *Rosmersholm*

Explanation: Rebecca West comes to the Rosmer estate and subtly manipulates events, leading to the suicide of the pastor’s wife, Beata. Overcome with guilt, she ultimately joins the pastor, Johannes Rosmer, in a suicidal plunge into the mill-race.

Correct Answer: C) Impending death in the Rosmer family

Explanation: These ghostly apparitions are said to appear just before a member of the Rosmer family dies, representing the inescapable and tragic pull of the past and family legacy.

Correct Answer: C) Their moral hypocrisy and secrets hidden beneath a veneer of respectability

Explanation: The play centers on Consul Karsten Bernick, a town’s leading citizen (“pillar of society”) whose success is built on a foundation of lies and deceit that are threatened with exposure.

Correct Answer: B) The younger generation that will eventually replace him

Explanation: Solness is terrified of “the younger generation knocking at the door,” a fear personified by the arrival of the energetic and demanding young woman, Hilde Wangel.

Correct Answer: C) He falls from the top of the new home he has built.

Explanation: Goaded on by Hilde to prove his mastery, he conquers his vertigo and climbs the tower, only to fall to his death in a moment of tragic and ambiguous triumph.

Correct Answer: B) *Ghosts*

Explanation: Mrs. Alving comes to realize that the life-denying “duty” she followed was a mistake and that her husband’s affair with the maid was, in its own way, an expression of the “joy of life” that was suffocated in their home.

Correct Answer: B) Hilde Wangel from *The Lady from the Sea*

Explanation: A younger version of Hilde Wangel appears in the earlier play. Ibsen brings her back, now ten years older, as the enigmatic figure who challenges Solness.

Correct Answer: D) A sculptor

Explanation: Rubek is a world-famous sculptor who feels he sacrificed his life and the life of his former model, Irene, for the sake of his art. The play is often seen as Ibsen’s final, remorseful look at his own artistic career.

Correct Answer: B) “Dramatic Epilogue”

Explanation: Ibsen himself subtitled the play “A Dramatic Epilogue in Three Acts,” signifying that it was his final statement and a conclusion to his life’s work.

Correct Answer: D) The sea

Explanation: Ellida feels a connection to the sea and is haunted by her promise to a mysterious sailor. The play explores themes of freedom, choice, and responsibility.

Correct Answer: D) Her husband gives her the freedom to choose, and by choosing freely, she chooses him.

Explanation: Dr. Wangel realizes he cannot hold her against her will. By granting her complete freedom “on her own responsibility,” he allows her to make an authentic choice, and she freely chooses to stay, breaking the sea’s spell.

Correct Answer: C) Kills the wild duck and then herself

Explanation: Misinterpreting Gregers Werle’s talk of a grand “sacrifice” to prove her love, the distraught Hedvig shoots herself in the attic, a tragic result of idealistic meddling.

Correct Answer: B) *Cataline*

Explanation: His first play was a historical tragedy in verse about the Roman conspirator Catiline, a theme reflecting the young Ibsen’s own revolutionary spirit.

Correct Answer: B) Konstantin Stanislavski

Explanation: Ibsen’s plays required a new style of acting that was psychologically truthful. Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre productions of Ibsen were foundational to the development of his “system” for realistic acting.

Correct Answer: A) Medieval history and domestic handicrafts of Brabant

Explanation: Tesman’s narrow, fussy, and uninspiring academic specialty stands in stark contrast to Hedda’s desire for a life of grand, dramatic beauty.

Correct Answer: A) *The League of Youth*

Explanation: This early prose play, a satire on political opportunism, features a character whose career is nearly ruined by a compromising speech he once made, which now exists in a single newspaper cutting.

Correct Answer: C) The letterbox key

Explanation: Torvald keeps the only key to the letterbox, giving him complete control over the family’s correspondence and symbolizing his control over what information Nora receives.

Correct Answer: C) The fourth wall

Explanation: Ibsen’s realistic dramas perfected the illusion of the “fourth wall,” an imaginary barrier at the front of the stage that separates the audience from the action, making them feel like they are secretly observing real life.

Correct Answer: B) Bergen

Explanation: From 1851 to 1857, Ibsen worked at the theatre in Bergen, where he was obliged to write and produce a new play each year, a formative if demanding period for his development.

Correct Answer: C) The glory and necessity of imperial expansion

Explanation: Ibsen’s focus was almost entirely on the individual, the family, and the domestic sphere, not on national or geopolitical issues like imperialism.

Correct Answer: B) Souls that have been true to their intended selves

Explanation: He is an agent of God (or fate) who melts down souls that were mediocre—neither good enough for heaven nor bad enough for hell—to be recast. He tells Peer he is destined for the ladle because he has never been his true self.

Correct Answer: B) Norwegian (Dano-Norwegian)

Explanation: He wrote in the common literary language of his time, which was heavily influenced by Danish rule and is known as Dano-Norwegian or *Riksmål*.

Correct Answer: C) Integrity-fever

Explanation: Gregers is obsessed with what he calls the “claim of the ideal”—the absolute necessity of living a life based on pure truth, no matter how destructive that truth may be.

Correct Answer: B) August Strindberg

Explanation: The Swedish playwright Strindberg had a deeply complex love-hate relationship with Ibsen’s work, seeing him as both a model and a misogynistic rival.

Correct Answer: D) A powerful industrialist sacrificing love and life for his dream of power

Explanation: Borkman is an ex-banker who paced for years in an upstairs room after a prison sentence, convinced he could regain his power. He realizes too late that he traded away “the warm, living human heart” for his ambition.

Correct Answer: A) *The Father*

Explanation: *The Father* is a famous naturalistic tragedy by Ibsen’s Swedish contemporary and rival, August Strindberg.

Correct Answer: C) Gradually revealing crucial events that happened long before the play begins.

Explanation: This is a hallmark of Ibsen’s realistic style. The stage action is driven by the slow unearthing of past secrets, creating a sense of inevitability and suspense, as seen in *Ghosts* and *A Doll’s House*.

Correct Answer: B) The moral decay inherited from the previous generation

Explanation: Much like Oswald’s syphilis in *Ghosts*, Dr. Rank’s hereditary disease, which he got from his pleasure-seeking father, serves as a powerful symbol of the sins and sickness of the past visiting the present.

Correct Answer: C) The conflict between paganism and Christianity under the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate

Explanation: This colossal double play was considered by Ibsen to be his masterpiece. It dramatizes Julian’s attempt to restore paganism and create a “third empire” synthesizing pagan and Christian values.

Correct Answer: A) “Man, to thyself be true!”

Explanation: The trolls’ selfish motto contrasts with the human ideal of being true to a higher, God-given purpose. Peer Gynt tragically adopts the troll motto as his own, leading to his life of selfish evasion.

Correct Answer: B) *Little Eyolf*

Explanation: The lame child Eyolf drowns in the fjord shortly after the appearance of the mystical Rat-Wife, forcing his parents, Alfred and Rita Allmers, to confront their guilt and the emptiness of their lives.

Correct Answer: B) A play that deals with a controversial social or moral issue

Explanation: Ibsen’s middle-period works are often called “problem plays” because they use the realistic setting of a middle-class drawing-room to dissect and debate pressing social problems like women’s rights, euthanasia, and political hypocrisy.

Correct Answer: B) A former schoolmate of Hedda’s and Løvborg’s muse

Explanation: The timid but determined Thea represents the conventional, creative, and nurturing femininity that Hedda despises and feels she lacks. Thea inspired Løvborg’s great work, which is why Hedda is so jealous.

Correct Answer: C) A red scarf

Explanation: The wild duck (*The Wild Duck*), General Gabler’s pistols (*Hedda Gabler*), and the white horses (*Rosmersholm*) are all powerful Ibsenite symbols. A red scarf is not a significant symbol in his major works.

Correct Answer: C) The mayor of the town and chairman of the Baths committee

Explanation: This puts him in direct political conflict with his brother, as he prioritizes the town’s economic interests over the “inconvenient” truth of the water’s contamination.

Correct Answer: D) *A Doll’s House*

Explanation: Nora’s famous declaration that she has a “duty to herself” that is just as sacred as her duties as a wife and mother was one of the most revolutionary statements made on the 19th-century stage.

Correct Answer: B) *The Pretenders*

Explanation: The success of this major historical drama brought Ibsen to the attention of fellow writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who helped him secure a state travel grant that enabled his long exile.

Correct Answer: B) A fascination with grim, morbid, and unpleasantly “suburban” topics

Explanation: Victorian critics in England used “Ibsenism” as a term of abuse, attacking his plays for their focus on “unwomanly” women, disease, and the deconstruction of the family, which they considered unhealthy and depressing.

Correct Answer: B) She is a widow who has had to work and face reality, while Nora is sheltered.

Explanation: Mrs. Linde’s life of hardship and practicality provides a stark contrast to Nora’s life in the “doll’s house,” helping to awaken Nora to the realities of the world outside.

Correct Answer: B) He has a talent for twisting the truth and manipulating people with pious language.

Explanation: Engstrand is a master hypocrite. He plans to open a “sailors’ home” (which will function as a brothel) and manipulates Pastor Manders into giving him the money and support for it.

Correct Answer: D) “I want for once in my life to have power to mould a human destiny.”

Explanation: This is Hedda’s cry to Judge Brack, revealing her desperate desire for influence and control over someone else’s life, a desire born from her own powerlessness.

Correct Answer: C) 1848

Explanation: The “Springtime of the Peoples,” the failed liberal revolutions across Europe in 1848, deeply disillusioned the young Ibsen, leading to his lifelong skepticism about mass politics and his focus on individual rebellion instead.

Correct Answer: C) A romantic, Dionysian ideal of triumphant, beautiful living (and dying)

Explanation: The “vine leaves in his hair” is a classical image associated with Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic frenzy. For Hedda, it represents an ideal of courageous, free-spirited, and beautiful self-destruction that she wants to witness.

Correct Answer: C) With fury, calling Nora a hypocrite, a liar, and a criminal

Explanation: His immediate, selfish reaction is concerned only with his own reputation (“I am saved!”). He shows no concern for Nora’s sacrifice or love, which is what shatters her illusions and triggers her transformation.

Correct Answer: D) The Judge (e.g., Judge Brack)

Explanation: Judge Brack in *Hedda Gabler* is the archetype of this figure—an apparently respectable man who understands and manipulates the sordid secrets of society for his own advantage.

Correct Answer: C) *The Scream*

Explanation: Ibsen and Munch were contemporaries, and Munch even designed sets for some Ibsen productions. The existential terror, psychological angst, and sense of a hostile universe found in Munch’s *The Scream* are frequently compared to the inner worlds of Ibsen’s characters.

Correct Answer: B) The oppressive, patriarchal marriage and society that have treated her as a toy

Explanation: The title is a powerful metaphor for Nora’s existence. She has been a “doll” to her father and then to her husband, living in a house where she was played with but never treated as a real, independent human being.

Correct Answer: B) The struggle of a simple man against the forces of war and nature

Explanation: This narrative poem tells the story of a Norwegian sailor who risks his life to row to Denmark for food for his family during the English blockade, embodying themes of resilience and the human spirit.

Correct Answer: D) All of the above

Explanation: The core of an Ibsen play is almost always a complex moral or psychological dilemma that forces characters (and the audience) to confront the clash between truth and lies, societal expectations and individual needs, and duty and freedom.

Correct Answer: B) *Little Eyolf*

Explanation: After their son Eyolf drowns, Rita and Alfred Allmers are forced to confront the fact that they never truly loved him for himself, but only as a possession and a link in their own intense, almost vampiric relationship.

Correct Answer: C) Georg Brandes

Explanation: Brandes was a highly influential critic who promoted the “Modern Breakthrough” in Scandinavian literature. His lectures and correspondence with Ibsen pushed the playwright away from Romanticism and towards confronting contemporary social issues.

Correct Answer: A) The limited roles available to intelligent, upper-class women

Explanation: Hedda is a woman of immense intelligence, energy, and spirit, but society offers her no outlet for these talents other than marriage and domesticity. Her destructive actions stem from this profound entrapment and boredom.

Correct Answer: C) In Solveig’s lap; in her faith, hope, and love

Explanation: This is the play’s final, poignant moment. After a lifetime of searching for his “Gyntian Self” across the world, his salvation and true identity are found in the woman who faithfully waited for him.

Correct Answer: C) Shakespeare

Explanation: Ibsen’s universal themes and powerful characters have ensured his enduring presence in the world’s theatrical repertoire, second only to William Shakespeare.

Correct Answer: B) He is a failed photographer who retouches photos.

Explanation: Hjalmar lives under the “life-lie” that he is on the verge of making a great invention, but in reality, he is a mediocre photographer supported by his wife, Gina, and his unacknowledged benefactor, Old Werle.

Correct Answer: D) Norwegian

Explanation: Along with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Alexander Kielland, and Jonas Lie, Henrik Ibsen is considered one of the “Great Four” of 19th-century Norwegian literature.

Correct Answer: C) Eilert Løvborg

Explanation: This is Hedda Gabler’s romanticized vision of Løvborg as a Dionysian figure, free from bourgeois convention—a vision shattered by the sordid reality of his death.

Correct Answer: B) “The sun.”

Explanation: As his mind collapses into syphilitic dementia, Oswald stares blankly into the sunrise, repeating “The sun… The sun.” It’s a moment of utter horror for Mrs. Alving as she realizes his consciousness is gone forever.

Correct Answer: C) The importance of stage props and setting to reflect character and theme

Explanation: Ibsen was meticulous about stage directions. In his realistic plays, every object—from Hedda’s pistols to Nora’s macaroons to the wild duck itself—is a carefully chosen symbol that illuminates the characters’ inner lives and the play’s central themes.

Correct Answer: D) Herself

Explanation: In her final confrontation with Torvald, Nora declares, “I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are—or, at all events, that I must try and become one.” This assertion of her duty to herself was the play’s most revolutionary statement.

Correct Answer: B) The Realism Cycle

Explanation: He conceived of his final twelve plays, from *The Pillars of Society* (1877) to *When We Dead Awaken* (1899), as a single, thematically linked body of work that would explore the human condition within a realistic framework.