About the work
Henrik Ibsen had been planning The Pretenders since 1858 but only resumed work on it after finishing Lady Inger and meeting Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in June 1863; the fair copy was finished by September 1863, and the play was published that October to modest initial sales. Ibsen himself directed the world premiere at the Christiania Theatre in January 1864, with Sigvart Gundersen as Håkon and Nicolaj Wolf as Skule.
Plot
After the Norwegian king dies without an undisputed heir, the illegitimate Håkon Håkonsson and the ruling regent Earl Skule Bårdsson contend for the crown in thirteenth-century Norway. Håkon believes he carries a God-given ‘king’s thought’: to unite Norway into one people; Skule tries in vain to claim this vision as his own. When Skule has himself proclaimed king in 1239, the conflict erupts into open war, in which he is killed in 1240.
Cultural significance
Contemporaries also read this historical drama about Norway’s succession wars as a coded reckoning with Ibsen’s own rivalry with his friend and competitor Bjørnson. Ibsen himself considered the dialogue so solid that he left it largely untouched in the revised 1870 edition still used as the standard text today.