The plays of Henrik Ibsen have a strong social content, indicating the views of the playwright on some matters, and more directly showing the way different social issues were developing in the society of his time and the way those issues were in turn shaping that society. He wrote about women's rights, the plight of "whistleblowers," the meaning of social responsibility, the effects of corruption. Ibsen's views and his challenging dramatic methods made him something of a social outcast even as he was becoming one of the world's major playwrights, a voice that would speak to subsequent generations perhaps even more strongly than he did to his own.
Eric Bentley states that Ibsen's place in the eyes of the world has changed over the years, passing through two phases. The first phase was that of the late nineteenth century, of Ibsen's own time, and in that phase one either expressed one's admiration for Ibsen or one's detestation of his iconoclasm. The second phase came in this century with the acceptance of Ibsen by society at large, but this had a price as well:
In the nineteenth century, playwrights were warned against Ibsen by the diehard, older critics; in the twentieth century they began to be warned against him by the advanced young spirits (Bentley 11).
In this century, in addition to revolts against Ibsen's technique, there were revolts against his ideology, notably by Bertolt Brecht with his Epic Theater, the purest example of collectivism in drama in this century. Ibsen was not a collectivist but an individualist, and he lived in a world where the salvation of the individual was seen as more important than the salvation of society, though oddly the two were often intertwined. Bentley says that his own generation of undergraduates had contempt for those who were only interested in saving their own souls rather than in addressing the real task of changing the world:
We didn't realize to what an appalling extent ...