“Ibsen's drama philosophizes—and it philosophizes well,” writes Kristin Gjesdal on the final page of The Drama of History (p. 201). While there have always been many ways to situate Ibsen's dramatic works in a philosophical context, the most common move has been to read Ibsen alongside three key figures of modern thought: Søren Kierkegaard, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche. This choice certainly makes sense given the intellectual and cultural history of Ibsen's time and place, and many valuable books and articles have offered philosophically informed readings of recurrent Ibsen topics such as idealism, selfhood, the relation of art to life, tragedy, and the existential burden of the past. The Drama of History is an important new work to add to this body of scholarship. Gjesdal aims to emphasize the dialogue between drama and philosophy without simply decoding dramatic thinking by using philosophical terminology or cataloguing the philosophical concepts that influenced Ibsen and other writers of his time. While Gjesdal sets aside the ideas of Kierkegaard as a topic that merits “a separate examination,” there is plenty of material to consider with the three other entities—the complex bodies of texts, receptions, and effects that go under the names Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Hegel (p. 7).Gjesdal differentiates her book from previous approaches by emphasizing the question of history, or historical self-consciousness—in the sense of how one relates to one's cultural and individual past in a moment of change or transition (p. 4). In line with this emphasis, the Ibsen dramas that receive chapter-length treatment include less commonly discussed early works of national history (The Vikings at Helgeland) and antiquity (Emperor and Galilean), along with Peer Gynt and several major works of the prose-play period (A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, and Hedda Gabler). Gjesdal's seven chapters are thoroughly grounded in many decades of Ibsen studies, as well as in her expert knowledge of nineteenth-century German philosophy and its legacies. This combination makes her exceptionally well-qualified to discuss drama's interest in philosophy and vice versa. Readers looking for an approach to philosophy and drama that goes beyond the tracing of influence or the paraphrasing of dramatic language in conceptual terms, while remaining committed to the significance of historical context, will be rewarded by Gjesdal's incisive analysis.Ibsen's 1850s dramas of national history have not often been analyzed in terms of their philosophical content, but Gjesdal, by treating Norwegian nasjonalromantikk as an “offshoot” of the German Sturm und Drang movement, and of Johann Gottfried Herder in particular, reconsiders The Vikings at Helgeland (1857). In her reading, this drama makes deliberate use of its medieval historical material to reflect on the modern predicament of being at a moment when old worldviews have lost their grip, but what will replace them in the future is undetermined. Understood in this way, suggests Gjesdal, The Vikings at Helgeland (and by extension, Ibsen's other early dramas) contributes to the dramatist's philosophical exploration of modern self-consciousness just as much as the later plays do (pp. 35–6).After this interesting attempt to rescue Ibsen's early dramas from their reputation as relatively unsophisticated work, the second chapter turns to one of his most vibrant and complex dramas, Peer Gynt, which certainly doesn't lack philosophical interpretations. It comes as no surprise that Gjesdal, a philosopher who specializes in the German tradition, is intimately familiar with Hegelian thought and aesthetics; she is also pedagogically clear in explaining its relevance to Ibsen. What makes this chapter even more worth reading is its close attention to the intermediate figures—the Scandinavian art historians and critics who subscribed to or adapted the Hegelian system of the arts and theater. Gjesdal follows Asbjørn Aarseth in arguing that Peer Gynt both draws on and ridicules Hegel; it draws on Hegel's critique of overblown romantic subjectivity while also mocking Hegelian systematic thinking in the figure of Begriffenfeldt (pp. 53–7). Via this reading, Gjesdal reaches some thought-provoking concluding remarks on the question of orientalism in Peer Gynt, aligning Ibsen at least partially with Herder's limited critique of Eurocentrism, as opposed to the “prejudices and projections” in Hegel's view of “Egypt” (pp. 60–1).After an illuminating chapter about Emperor and Galilean, in which Ibsen's work is again shown to have a creative and flexible engagement with Hegel's ideas, rather than being simply pro- or anti-Hegelian, Gjesdal moves on to A Doll's House in the fourth chapter. She disentangles the way that Ibsen's most discussed and performed drama rejects aspects of Hegel's thought (his reactionary views of marriage and women's roles) while preserving a central feature of Hegel's historicism in its “heroic attempt to shatter a confining, ahistorical image of the beautiful life” (p. 89). Gjesdal notices an interesting link between Emperor and Galilean and A Doll's House, seemingly very different dramas, as she maps the dramatic journeys of their protagonists onto the Hegelian notion of the transition from ancient Rome to Christianity, or the move to abandon external symbols and practices in favor of the inwardness of the individual self (p. 96). In the case of Nora, this entails a labor of reflection to move beyond the static “petrified aestheticism” of Torvald Helmer and his timeless ideals—not toward different timeless ideals, but into a modern recognition of contingency, fragility, and possibility (p. 133).It makes sense chronologically that Nietzsche enters the book later than Hegel, although this entrance comes sooner than those familiar with Ibsen might expect, in the chapter about Ghosts rather than Hedda Gabler (or in what could have been potential additional chapters about Rosmersholm or The Master Builder). By this point, halfway through the book, the reader has become familiar with claims that an Ibsen drama “both draws on and goes beyond” a given philosophical model (p. 117). Gjesdal productively applies that formula to Ghosts and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. Again, her attention to Scandinavian intellectual history, including the early Nordic Nietzsche reception, provides more contextual detail than is sometimes found in studies of canonical philosophy and literature. She uses The Birth of Tragedy to avoid the familiar reading of Ghosts as a drama about Mrs. Alving's belated recognition or too-late pursuit of self-knowledge. For Mrs. Alving and Oswald, as Gjesdal writes, “coming to grips with the past is an experience of existential terror that undermines all didactic orientations” (pp. 144–5).The final two chapters each offer stimulating revisions to received understandings of how Nietzsche is relevant to Ibsen, first with An Enemy of the People and then with Hedda Gabler. Gjesdal shifts the focus from the tendency to associate Nietzsche with Dr. Stockmann's politically problematic fourth-act elitism in An Enemy, arguing instead that Nietzsche's deep commitment to an emancipatory model of education is the relevant philosophical issue in this drama. In the case of Hedda Gabler, Gjesdal moves away from the “consensus line of reading” that locates the Nietzschean element in Eilert Løvborg's “Dionysian” vine leaves, and she instead reads the drama alongside Untimely Meditations (pp. 173–5). Specifically, Gjesdal inspects how the academic characters Tesman and Løvborg embody the differences between Nietzsche's “antiquarian” and “critical” historians, respectively, and she further analyzes Hedda's dilemma as a battle “of untimeliness” between these competing notions of history's existential meaning (p. 195).The Drama of History integrates philosophy, intellectual history, and dramatic criticism to outline an Ibsen whose dramatic forms reflect profoundly on the nature of historical existence. The book includes a fair amount of biographical and contextual detail, even though its main interest in “history” and “modernity” is philosophical, addressing the significance of past tradition in an era of self-reflection and subjective autonomy. This is not a book about theatrical performance. Its major strength is in showing through textual readings how “Ibsen offers a form in which thoughts are embodied and presented as options with real-life consequences and costs” (p. 199). While it will obviously appeal to philosophically inclined readers and especially those familiar with the German tradition, the book is clear and instructive enough to benefit a wider audience of scholars and students. It offers many productive insights and suggestions for new ways to teach, read, and reflect on the ideas of Ibsen's dramas.