Henrik Ibsen the philosopher-playwright has a well-established critical history, beginning with the work of contemporaries such as the philosopher Georg Brandes, playwright George Bernard Shaw, and translator William Archer. In the twentieth century, Eric Bentley labeled Ibsen as one of the first “playwright[s] as thinker,” Brian Johnston saw him as the creator of his very own Hegelian dramatic cycle, and Bruce Shapiro argued that he is the conduit for the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. The latest entry in this philosophical tradition is Kristin Gjesdal's 2020 The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche.

What is a drama of history? Each of Gjesdal's three protagonists offer different interpretations. For the idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, history is a progressive march forward, evolving steadily toward its telos. For the prophet of eternal recurrence Friedrich Nietzsche, history is a set of circumstances to be overthrown and built anew. For Ibsen, Gjesdal argues, “the experience of history” is “a formative condition of modern life” (3). The Drama of History, then, is not simply about the history of drama and philosophy or dramatizations of history. It treats Ibsen's dramatic response to the idea of historicity itself. In this regard, Gjesdal's book responds directly to, and often cites, Toril Moi's 2006 Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. Whereas Moi defines Ibsen's modernism by its anti-idealism, Gjesdal takes a complementary approach, characterizing his modernism by its historical consciousness.

Gjesdal's chapters are ordered chronologically and thematically linked, but she circumspectly avoids a straightforward narrative progression of Ibsen's conversion from Hegelianism to Nietzscheanism. She is explicit that she has little interest in tracking “fixed philosophical ideas and movements that inspired Ibsen” (ix). Instead, she hopes “to show how he uses the dramatic form to wrestle with and explore philosophical ideas as they were generated and given credence within the cultural context of which he was a part” (200). Thus, the primary goal of The Drama of History is to chart the way Ibsen's work “goes beyond” his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries (3).

Gjesdal's first chapter, on The Vikings at Helgeland, begins not with Hegel or Nietzsche but the Sturm und Drang philosophers and playwrights who preceded them (in particular Johann Gottfried Herder, on whom Gjesdal has also written). Consistent with the Sturm und Drang ethos, Gjesdal argues, Vikings turns to an idealized, folkloric era. But even if the play depicts a romanticized past, it also enacts “the lived experience of time passing, of values changing” (32), which undercuts its romantic qualities with a sense of history. Ibsen, Gjesdal concludes contra Moi, does not sharply turn from idealism in his later works but undermines it from his earliest plays.

In her three subsequent chapters, Gjesdal analyzes the Hegelian currents in three of Ibsen's early to midcareer plays. Two of these plays, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, are often connected to Hegel. Gjesdal, however, locates new ways of bringing his philosophy to bear upon them. Peer Gynt explicitly satirizes Hegel in its fourth act, but Gjesdal reads the work as both more interested in Hegel and more harshly critical than others have. Peer Gynt, Gjesdal argues, dramatizes Hegel's philosophy of a self that can be defined only through contact with the other, but by setting act IV in Egypt (the subject some of Hegel's most chauvinistic musings on culture), “Ibsen makes us consider the fallacies of individual and cultural narratives of self-sufficiency and supremacy” (61). Similarly, although many see in Emperor and Galilean a dramatization of Hegelian dialectic in Julian's pursuit of a “third empire” that synthesizes paganism and Christianity, Gjesdal observes that the play never achieves this synthesis. Instead, she highlights Julian's individual experience of “the difficult historical-existential moment of a consciousness that suffers the costs of its own progress” (83). Gjesdal's third Hegelian text is a somewhat surprising addition: A Doll's House. Whereas most criticism of the play gravitates toward the categories of feminism and realism, in Gjesdal's reading, Nora's decision to leave Torvald is not only a rebuke of nineteenth-century gender norms but also the culmination of a Hegelian Bildung, in which alienation is a necessary part of an education (110).

In her fifth chapter, on Ghosts, Gjesdal shifts to a Nietzschean analysis of Ibsen's plays but retains her focus on Bildung. Drawing on Nietzsche and the philosopher Hedwig Dohm's response to him, she argues that through the transformation of Mrs. Alving, Ibsen “dissects conventionalist values and places a spotlight on the life-transforming force of art” (143). In Chapter 6, Gjesdal similarly argues that although An Enemy of the People's Dr. Stockmann expresses spite for fellow humans, his defiance is tied up in a larger desire to educate and improve humanity. Gjesdal concludes her analysis with the Nietzschean project of self-actualization in Hedda Gabler. Stifled by her limitations as “the dramaturge of her living room” (192), Hedda adopts a nihilism that is both pessimistic and life-affirming, albeit in a way that “can only come through acceptance of human finitude, thus also of historical existence” (198). Gjesdal concludes her section on Hedda with a brief survey of Ibsen's heroines, asserting that these “tragic characters are profoundly earnest; they do, in an important sense, take their lives, their worlds, and their historicity seriously” (198).

The scope of Gjesdal's work is monumental. She writes across almost the entire arc of Ibsen's oeuvre, a century of European philosophy, and the scholarly traditions of (at least) three languages. Thus, while her choice to largely omit both The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm as well as Ibsen's four final plays strikes me as a missed opportunity, it is hard to argue that the book's text—coming in at just over 200 pages—is too narrowly argued. Similarly, I would have enjoyed more elaboration on Ibsen's productive friendship with Brandes—probably the single most important critical and philosophical influence in his life—and a deeper engagement with his plays as theatre, in particular their performance histories (Gjesdal briefly and tantalizingly discusses Thomas Ostermeier's Nora and Hedda), but The Drama of Ideas has opened new pathways for subsequent treatments of these topics. As valuable as Gjesdal's meticulous research is, the new interpretive possibilities she raises are an even greater critical contribution, not only for philosophers but for theatre scholars and practitioners as well.