Evert Sprinchorn's biography of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works, published by Yale University Press in 2020, is riddled throughout with errors and presents neither new information about “the Man” nor particularly insightful interpretations of “His Works.” Sprinchorn has missed what amounts to a revolution in historical and biographical research into Ibsen's life spearheaded by Ivo de Figueiredo's two-volume biography Henrik Ibsen: Mennesket (2006; Henrik Ibsen: The Human Being) and Henrik Ibsen: Masken (2007; Henrik Ibsen: The Mask).1 De Figueiredo's groundbreaking study is now available in one volume in Robert Ferguson's English translation, also published by Yale University Press (de Figueiredo 2019). The 2010 publication of Den biografiske Ibsen (The Biographical Ibsen) marks a major advancement in Ibsen scholarship overlooked by Sprinchorn; this collection of articles calls into question the historical accuracy of many of the persistent biographical tropes about Ibsen (Sæther, Dingstad, Kittang, and Rekdal 2010). Sprinchorn cites neither this important volume, nor any of the meticulously researched and compelling biographical, book-historical, and theater-historical findings by scholars such as Anette Storli Andersen, Ståle Dingstad, Narve Fulsås (both alone and together with Tore Rem), Ellen Karoline Gjervan, Live Hov, Jørgen Haave, and Jon Nygaard.The lack of historical accuracy in Sprinchorn's biography of “the Man” would be fatal enough, but he takes it one step further, approaching “His Works” through the lens of biography and frequently using apocryphal or disproven tropes about Ibsen's life as keys to interpretation. Citing Ibsen's pronouncement that “only by grasping and comprehending my entire production as a continuous and coherent whole will the reader be able to receive the precise impression I sought to convey in the individual parts of it” as his point of departure, Sprinchorn inexplicably proposes to read Ibsen's works “as Ibsen wished, as chapters in an autobiography” (Sprinchorn 2020, 15). This is unfounded. Ibsen himself distinguished between his lived and imaginative experiences as they related to his dramatic production: “Alt, hvad jeg har digtet, hænger på det nøjeste sammen med hvad jeg har gennemlevet—om end ikke oplevet” (Ibsen 2009, 47; emphasis in original) [Everything I have written is intricately connected to what I have lived through—if not experienced directly].2 Here, Ibsen clearly suggests that the truth value of fiction lies not in facticity but in its experiential authenticity. Yet Sprinchorn insists, for example, that The League of Youth is “an autobiographical document” and The Wild Duck is Ibsen's “autobiography in the form of a play” (Sprinchorn 2020, 132, 17). Sprinchorn uses the latter claim in support of his thematization of what he calls Ibsen's “divided spirit,” with Hjalmar Ekdal and Gregers Werle ostensibly functioning as little more than a double self-portrait. Similarly, Sprinchorn argues that “behind the Krogstad figure [in A Doll's House] stands Ibsen himself,” while at the same time, “there is more of Ibsen in Nora than of the woman who inspired the play [Laura Kieler]” (Sprinchorn 2020, 283, 291). Sprinchorn leverages these character dyads to illustrate his overarching biographical claim: In his plays Ibsen experienced inwardly the conflict between the two sides of his personality, leading outwardly a life of growing success while experiencing the inner qualms of the imperfect idealist. The inner and outer lives, art and reality, were perfectly coiled around each other. The present book attempts to explore that double helix as the source of Ibsen's creativity, a helix that raises him to the level of the philosopher-dramatist and made him the father of modern drama. (Sprinchorn 2020, xii)Since everything about “the Man” and “His Works” both explains and is explained by Ibsen's ostensible “double spirit,” according to Sprinchorn, he goes so far as to claim that “the inner conflict affected even his physiognomy,” in reference to the notable asymmetry of Ibsen's eyes, as if this physical quirk were some kind of meaningful evidence about the nature of the dramatist (Sprinchorn 2020, 18). The book contains numerous similarly unfounded pseudo-scientific comments, such as the dangerously misleading conflation of Danish critic Clemens Petersen's alleged pedophilia with homosexuality (Sprinchorn 2020, 142) or the counterfactual assumption that the place name “Grimstad” makes use of the English adjective “grim” and thus “lived up to its name” (Sprinchorn 2020, 25).3 In general, Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works suffers from the lack of a firm editorial hand, which might have eliminated its many blunders, redundancies, and tangents.After a brief introduction, Sprinchorn divides his book into three chronological sections. Part One (roughly 230 pages), “The Third Kingdom,” starts with a chapter that discusses Ibsen's death and a narrow range of his European critical reception before going on to present the dramatist's life from birth through the publication of Emperor and Galilean (1873). Part Two (also roughly 230 pages), “The Divided Kingdom,” covers Ibsen's consequential mid-career shift toward a new dramatic form, ranging from Pillars of Society (1877) to Hedda Gabler (1890). The third and final part (around 100 pages), “The Lost Kingdom,” covers Ibsen's growing international fame, the last four plays from The Master Builder (1892) through When We Dead Awaken (1899), and the years of ill health until his death in 1906.Perhaps the most thoroughly debunked biographical trope that Sprinchorn repeats concerns Ibsen's family of origin. This trope was established in 1882 by Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, who described Ibsen's upbringing in the following manner: “Han blev født (20. Marts 1828) i smaa og fattige Forhold i en lille norsk by” (quoted in Nygaard 2013, 8) [He was born (20 March 1828) into small and impoverished circumstances in a small Norwegian town]. As theater historian Jon Nygaard points out, Ibsen himself wrote to Brandes to explain that on this one point in his otherwise accurate “literary portrait,” the influential critic was mistaken: En faktisk unøjagtighed i Deres fremstilling skal jeg få lov til at berigtige. Mine forældre tilhørte både på fædrene og mødrene side datidens mest ansete familjer i Skien. Stedets mangeårige storthingsrepræsentant, byfogd Paus og dennes bror sorenskriver Paus var min fars halvbrødre og min mors fættere. Ligeså nær beslægtede var mine forældre med familjerne Plesner, v. d. Lippe, Cappelen, Blom, altså omtrent med alle de patricierfamiljer, som dengang dominerede stedet og omegnen. (Ibsen 2009, 146; see also Nygaard 2013, 12)(I should be allowed to correct one factual imprecision in your presentation. My parents belonged on both their paternal and maternal sides to the most esteemed families in Skien at the time. The longtime local parliamentary representative, bailiff Paus and his brother judge Paus were my father's half-brothers and my mother's cousins. My parents were equally closely related to the Plesner, von der Lippe, Cappelen, and Blom families, in other words to all of the patrician families that dominated the place and its environs at the time.)De Figueiredo was the first major Ibsen biographer to take Ibsen's correction of Brandes seriously, and his presentation of Ibsen's family and community of origin is thus quite different than Sprinchorn's (de Figueiredo 2006, 23–36). Two more recent Norwegian biographies that focus primarily on Ibsen's origins—Nygaard's “. . . af stort est du kommen”: Henrik Ibsen og Skien (2013; “. . . you come from greatness”: Henrik Ibsen and Skien) and Jørgen Haave's Familien Ibsen (2017; The Ibsen Family)—present even more extensive documentation about the Ibsen family's high social and economic status as leading members of the patrician class in what they both describe as one of Norway's most cosmopolitan and advanced centers of capital and culture during the first half of the 1800s, as well as how the family weathered the widespread economic collapse of the 1830s (see also Nygaard 2014). Moreover, Haave, who holds a position as curator at Telemark Museum, has initiated a consequential restoration of Ibsen's childhood home, the estate of Venstøp in Skien; the fact that the house was converted to a two-family dwelling decades after it was sold by Knud Ibsen appears not to have been appreciated by most subsequent historians and biographers, leading them to assume that Ibsen had grown up in a much less capacious and elegant home than he actually did (Haave 2018). Apparently unaware of the overwhelming evidence of Ibsen's upper-class background, Sprinchorn insists on characterizing him as “the archetype of the middle-class serious dramatist” rather than a member of the closest thing Norway had to an aristocracy, albeit one that lost most of its power during his lifetime (Sprinchorn 2020, 17).While the financial crash that eventually led to Knud Ibsen's loss of property and business interests in 1835 would clearly have been traumatic for the family, de Figueiredo, Nygaard, and Haave note that this economic downturn affected the entire patrician class in Norway, and that, relatively speaking, Ibsen's father staved off financial ruin as well as or better than many of his elite peers. Thus, the period from 1835, when Ibsen was seven, until 1843, when Ibsen's father was forced to sell Venstøp and Ibsen left home at the age of fifteen to become an apothecary's apprentice, was not in fact marked by “food so scarce that the potatoes in the storage room were carefully counted out for each meal,” as Sprinchorn would have it (2020, 22). Haave, who engages extensively with rarely consulted sources from Ibsen's childhood, points out: “Det er ofte et mørkt skjær over livet på Venstøp i Ibsen-biografiene, men Hans Houen, som kjent Knud Ibsen godt, hadde selv inntrykk av at livet på Venstøp var nokså lystig” (2017, 112) [There is often a dark cloud over life at Venstøp in the Ibsen biographies, but Hans Houen, who knew Knud Ibsen well, had the impression that life at Venstøp was rather merry]. De Figueiredo, too, presents a more balanced picture: “Den følelsen av skam, vanære og sosial utstøting som gjerne er tilskrevet Knud Ibsens skjebne, har lite for seg i sosialhistorisk lys. Det var så mange som ble ruinert, det kunne hende den beste—og gjorde det” (2006, 33) [The feeling of shame, disgrace and social expulsion that is often ascribed to Knud Ibsen's fate doesn't really hold up socio-historically. There were so many who were ruined, it could happen to the best of them—and it did]. And, in fact, the most serious economic and social decline in the Ibsen family happened after the dramatist had left home.Sprinchorn similarly misrepresents the literary and dramatic field that Ibsen entered upon his debut in 1850, repeating the trope that Ibsen's Catiline “was the first original play to be published in Norway in seven years and new literary works were not exactly plentiful” (Sprinchorn 2020, 36). This verifiably false claim, which builds on a misreading of Paul Botten-Hansen's review of Catiline as its sole source, appears repeatedly in Ibsen scholarship (e.g., Koht 1954, 57; Meyer 1971, 56; McFarlane 1989, 108; Ferguson 1996, 35; Moi 2006, 41; Fulsås and Rem 2018, 12).While it is true that the market was small, at least fourteen original plays by Norwegian writers (including the eminently canonical Henrik Wergeland) appeared between 1843 and 1850 (Ystad 2005, 62–3). The reason this matters is that it alters our understanding of Ibsen's early years as a theater practitioner and literary author. Recent scholarship has begun to unravel the notion that Ibsen was a sui generis genius who developed in isolation from his Norwegian cultural context. We see this in Live Hov's monograph on Ibsen's time in the theater (2007), as well as in two dissertations, Ellen Karoline Gjervan's “Creating Theatrical Space: A Study of Henrik Ibsen's Production Books, Bergen 1852–1857” (2010; see also Gjervan 2011) and Anette Storli Andersen's “Deus ex machina? Henrik Ibsen og teatret i norsk offentlighet 1780–1864” (2010; Deus ex machina? Henrik Ibsen and the Theater in Norwegian Public Life; see also Andersen 2011; 2015). These studies provide significant new knowledge about the state of the Norwegian theater during Ibsen's lifetime, as well as his specific contributions to and lessons learned from working hands-on in the theater for over a decade, yet there is no trace of these findings in Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works.Another pivotal episode from Ibsen's early years that Sprinchorn misrepresents concerns Ibsen's relationship to Susanne Daae Thoresen, more commonly known as Suzannah. He repeats a number of tropes that are debunked in Astrid Sæther's Suzannah: Fru Ibsen (2008; Suzannah: Mrs. Ibsen). Sæther makes a strong argument for dating the engagement between Ibsen and Suzannah to 1855, a year earlier than other biographers have claimed, based on a previously undiscovered letter from Suzannah's brother Herman (2008, 60). Sprinchorn lists Sæther's book in his bibliography but ignores her findings regarding the circumstances of the engagement (Sprinchorn 2020, 49). In general, he relies on a largely misogynistic scholarly tradition—one that posits Suzannah as a kind of nineteenth-century Yoko Ono—for insight into her personality, citing Sæther only twice in the entire book (2020, 55, 275). Sprinchorn presents Suzannah as a shrewish burden rather than a worthy partner, for example, blaming “the qualities that Suzannah lacked” for Ibsen's interest in other women and dismissing her apparent trauma at the birth of Sigurd in 1859 as what he calls “her ungodly wish for no more children” (Sprinchorn 2020, 50, 52). In comparison, Sæther gives a much more thoughtful account of the family dynamics, concluding truthfully: “Hva som var den egentlige grunnen til at paret ikke fikk flere barn, vet vi ikke” (2008, 89) [We do not know the real reason for why the couple did not have more children].Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem describe the dominant trope for Ibsen's move to Italy as follows: “After having been met with nothing but misunderstanding, bordering on persecution, Henrik Ibsen left his native country in 1864, becoming an exile.” Importantly, they note that “the main features of this master narrative of Ibsen's career originated in the author's own time, and were in part created by himself” (Fulsås and Rem 2018, 1). What characterizes much of the newer Norwegian historical research on Ibsen is a willingness to question this master narrative even—or perhaps especially—when the dramatist himself had a hand in constructing it. Regarding Ibsen's ostensible failures early in life, for example, Ståle Dingstad presents compelling evidence that “alt vi vet om Ibsens liv og virksomhet, hans arbeid og økonomi, gir grunnlag for å fremstille historien om livet hans som en eneste lang suksess” (2010, 94–5) [everything we know about Ibsen's life and activities, his work and personal finances, gives reason to present the story of his life as one long success]. While Ibsen clearly struggled with both debt and alcoholism during the early 1860s, he was at the same time given opportunity after opportunity and in fact deftly positioned himself at the very center of the intellectual and aesthetic debates of the day, as Dingstad documents in the book Den smilende Ibsen: Henrik Ibsens forfatterskap—stykkevis og delt (2013; The Smiling Ibsen: Henrik Ibsen's Oeuvre—Partially and Divided). Yet again, no trace of this groundbreaking research comes through in Sprinchorn's book.Of course, few books are entirely bad, and Sprinchorn is at his best when describing the political context within which Ibsen and his colleague, friend, and rival Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson operated. He draws on numerous contemporary sources to construct an overview of the political developments that Ibsen satirized in The League of Youth; indeed, a methodology based on a one-to-one relationship between historical fact and literary expression works better when used as a key to identifying the real-world targets of an overtly satirical work like The League of Youth than it does in relation to Ibsen's deeper, more complex and existential dramas. Yet here, too, Sprinchorn could have gained from familiarity with Dingstad's book, which explores the importance of The League of Youth both as a successful comedy and as a pivotal precursor to Ibsen's realist project during the last half of his career (Dingstad 2013, 214–29). Sprinchorn fails to recognize the fundamentally comedic and satirical nature of the play, criticizing Ibsen because “no high ideal motivated him when he wrote The League of Youth,” and going on to equate Ibsen with the character Stensgaard in terms of his “craving for social esteem and independence” (Sprinchorn 2020, 153). This reading seems not to take into account the anti-idealist Ibsen's satirical bent, evidenced from as early as his years in Grimstad, and an essential if occasionally cruel element of his worldview.One of the more convincing claims that Sprinchorn makes is that Ibsen's ideology resembles the nihilistic and anarchistic philosophy of Max Stirner; Sprinchorn points this out in discussing the differences between Ibsen and Brandes in the lead-up to the Modern Breakthrough (2020, 182–3). Yet again, however, Sprinchorn overlooks existing research, citing none of the many studies that explore the topic (see, for example, Gran 1918, 27; Nærø 2007, 186; Nærø 2008, 38–9; Sokól 2007; Waage 2008). And, again, he relies on the trope of the “divided spirit” as an explanation (“What the poet in him loathed, the crushing of the individual beneath the juggernaut of the state, the tyrant in him admired” [Sprinchorn 2020, 185]), rather than, for example, exploring the patrician values with which Ibsen was raised as a potential source for his ambivalence toward democracy.The problem with Sprinchorn's biographical interpretation of the literary works becomes especially clear in relation to his analysis of the two most important works from the first half of Ibsen's career, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867). In two frankly bizarre readings, Sprinchorn equates the characters Brand and Peer Gynt with the biblical God, and ultimately with Ibsen himself. He first argues, not unreasonably, that Brand increasingly comes to resemble Jesus during the fifth act. Sprinchorn then points out what he sees as a key similarity between the story of Jesus and Brand's tribulations: A voice out of a cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, in who I am well pleased.” Ibsen draws an explicit parallel: in Brand, the voice cries out of a thunderclap, “He is deus caritatis!” and “he” cannot refer to the utterer of the words but only to Brand. (And the biblical God never refers to himself in the third person.) Those last words express fulfillment, not condemnation. They sound not an ironic and dissonant concluding chord but a perfectly harmonious resolution to Brand's struggles and an affirmation of the correctness of his views and way of life. (Sprinchorn 2020, 79)While it is true that the biblical God does not refer to himself in the third person, there is nothing in the dramatic poem to indicate exactly who the speaker is, and certainly nothing that definitively identifies the speaker as the biblical God. It also seems highly improbable that such a god would designate Brand as deus caritatis, “the tolerant and forgiving God,” and thus a direct manifestation of the godhead. If, as is far more probable, the unidentified voice comes from someone else, the likelihood that the word “he” refers to Brand is even slimmer. Yet Sprinchorn's conclusion is unequivocal: “Brand becomes God” (2020, 80).Sprinchorn sets up a similar equivalency between the character Peer Gynt and the biblical God, using the following brief exchange in the final scene of Peer Gynt as his only evidence: PEER GYNT studser tillbageHvad siger du—? Ti! Det er gjøglende Ord.Till Gutten derinde er selv du Moer.SOLVEJGDet er jeg, ja; men hvem er hans Fader?Det er han, som for Moderens Bøn forlader. (Ibsen 2007, 746)(PEER GYNT startledWhat are you saying—? Quiet! Those are hypocritical words.To the boy inside, you yourself are mother.SOLVEJGThat I am, yes; but who is his father?It is he who forgives because of the mother's prayer.)Sprinchorn's claim that “Peer sees that he himself must be the father of the boy within” seems highly improbable (2020, 100). I at least see no evidence of an existential insight of this magnitude reflected here or in Peer's immediate response to Solvejg: “Min Moder; min Hustru; uskyldig Kvinde!—/ O, gjem mig, gjem mig derinde!” (Ibsen 2007, 746) [My mother; my wife; innocent woman!—/ O, hide me, hide me in there!]. It is far more likely that Solvejg is simply reminding Peer of the Christian belief that the biblical God is a forgiving father to all, including the wayward Peer.Sprinchorn goes on to make an even greater conceptual leap, apparently equating Ibsen himself with the character Peer Gynt and, by extension, God: “Ibsen is employing Christian mysticism to formulate an existential philosophy that makes the individual his own redeemer—to rid himself of Christianity, to subvert Kierkegaard, and to turn himself into God” (2020, 100). Certainly, scholars and critics have argued over the meaning of the rather inscrutable endings of these two dramatic poems since their publication, and they have seen autobiographical traces in both characters, especially given the dramatist's comment that “Brand er mig selv i mine bedste øjeblikke” in a letter from 1870 (Ibsen 2005, 428) [Brand is myself in my best moments]. But to ascribe to Ibsen this level of monomania seems unfounded and does a disservice not only to the historical Ibsen, but also to the complexity and openness of the works in question.Unsurprisingly, Sprinchorn, a respected scholar of drama, is on much firmer ground when he directs his attention toward the development of realist drama and the so-called problem play. At the same time, he moves away from Ibsen's personal history per se in order to sketch out the backdrop for the changes in the dramatist's approach to writing plays during this period. Also unsurprisingly, given his reputation as an expert on August Strindberg, the perspective of the Swedish dramatist, whom Sprinchorn rather provokingly calls “Ibsen's most incisive critic,” dominates this section of the book (Sprinchorn 2020, 290). He includes passages taken from Strindberg's writing that seem only tangentially relevant, particularly given the dramatist's thoroughly documented hostility toward Ibsen; these include Strindberg's meditation on a portrait of Ibsen, a (fictive) description of the staging of a French play from the 1882 novel, The New Kingdom, and a poem about the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (2020, 246, 253–4, 375).Sprinchorn rightly dwells on the fact that Bjørnson began to experiment with the form that would come to be known as realist drama with A Bankruptcy (1875) and The Editor (also 1875) well before Ibsen's breakthrough in 1879. Bjørnson's A Bankruptcy was indeed “the first Norwegian play to achieve international success,” but at the same time, Sprinchorn continues to demonstrate his lack of knowledge about the Norwegian context, calling Bjørnson, in actuality a pastor's son, a “plucky farm boy on whom the gods smiled,” and relying exclusively on the Swedish context—which, while in many ways similar and certainly legally intertwined, was not identical—for his understanding of the status of women in Norway (Sprinchorn 2020, 259, 260, 272).Sprinchorn sums up his brief chapter on Pillars of Society by again equating Ibsen with the main character, this time arguing that Ibsen shared with the businessman Karsten Bernick the characteristic that, as Bernick says near the end of the play, “a desire and a hunger for power, influence, respect, a craving for influence and for position have been the driving forces behind most of my actions” (2020, 266). The implication here is that Ibsen, like Bernick, is a scoundrel, and one begins to suspect that Sprinchorn dislikes Ibsen almost as much as Strindberg did. In Sprinchorn's view, Ibsen is an utter solipsist: “Ibsen's lifelong quarrel was with himself, and the outer scene engaged him only to the extent that it might explain or alleviate the division within himself” (2020, 270). By this point, not even halfway through the book, the disparate and conflicting characterizations of Ibsen through the supposedly “autobiographical” status of his major characters is dizzying.When it comes to Ibsen's most famous work, A Doll's House, Sprinchorn again plays fast and loose, both with previous scholarship and with his interpretation of the text and its background. He is critical of William Archer's rendering of the title Et dukkehjem as A Doll's House, apparently unaware of Mark B. Sandberg's thoughtful reflections on the same topic (2015, 69–70). He emphasizes that “the money she [Nora] regularly pays Krogstad comes from the pin money and the money for clothes . . . that Torvald gives her,” missing the important fact that Nora takes on paid employment in secret and that it is thus not, as he argues, entirely Torvald who “pays for his trip to Italy without knowing it” (Sprinchorn 2020, 287). Sprinchorn dismisses Ibsen's intellectual relationship with the groundbreaking author and feminist Camilla Collett, in effect claiming that it was only because of pressure from Suzannah that Ibsen grudgingly acknowledged any merit in Collett's feminist critique: “Ibsen found Collett a talented but very unhappy person, while she won the sympathy and support of both Suzannah and her sister Marie Thoresen” (2020, 276). Sæther presents a more nuanced representation of the intellectual exchange that took place between Collett and the Ibsens over a number of years, demonstrating how seriously, if at times contrarily, the dramatist in fact engaged with her.4 Perhaps the most striking claim in the three chapters Sprinchorn dedicates to A Doll's House is that it is “one of the great ironies in social history” that Ibsen rather than Strindberg has been viewed as “the hero of the feminists” (2020, 291). Of course, this flies in the face of nearly 150 years of thoughtful critical reception of the two dramatists by feminists the world over—ah, but what do we know?The chapters that round out this section of the book—on Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Ibsen's emerging dramatic form and symbolism, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, and Hedda Gabler—are, with some important exceptions, less speculative and thus less problematic than what comes before them. Sprinchorn has previously written convincingly on the topic of syphilis in Ghosts and is on firm footing there, but without any real context or evidence, he picks up on Ingjald Nissen's idiosyncratic psychoanalytical interpretation of The Wild Duck (from 1931, republished in 1973), arguing that Gregers has “homosexual inclinations.” He does this, however, without employing the same caution in making this claim that Nissen does, and even if the reader agrees that Gregers is secretly attracted to Hjalmar sexually, Sprinchorn's terminology (“sexually suspect”) is derogatory (2020, 348). Moreover, this line of reasoning seems strange to the point of incoherent as an element in his argument for an autobiographical reading of these two characters as two sides of Ibsen's personality: “As autobiography, the Ekdal story is fiction; the Gregers story is true” (2020, 349). Sprinchorn frequently takes extremely oblique suggestions in the plays as fact, such as when he insists categorically that the late Mrs. Werle was an alcoholic and that the Stranger in The Lady from the Sea was sodomized by the captain he later murdered (2020, 348, 361, 432). He devotes almost an entire chapter to describing the affair between Georg Brandes and Victoria Benedictsson in lurid detail, ostensibly as background for Hedda Gabler, but ends up identifying Hedda not so much with Benedictsson as with Ibsen himself, like Michael Meyer before him (Sprinchorn 2020, 442–50, 454).Sprinchorn does clearly and painstakingly demonstrate his thorough knowledge of the well-trodden ground of Ibsen's contributions to the development of realist dramatic form during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This period is, however, covered much more succinctly by, among others, Fulsås and Rem in Ibsen, Scandinavia, and the Making of a World Drama, which has the added strengths of presenting new information about the legal and financial aspects of the literary market, as well as integrating and going into critical dialogue with the recent biographical and historical scholarship that Sprinchorn ignores.In the final section of Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works, Sprinchorn further elaborates his biographical approach to Ibsen's plays. For example, he argues strenuously for reading The Master Builder as a strictly autobiographical play in which the characters are merely “puppets” who “act out Ibsen's progress as a dramatist” (2020, 508); old Brovik represents Ibsen's earliest works, the dead twins “are” Brand and Peer Gynt, Kaja and Ragnar make the realistic problem plays possible, and the fire that burns the house down “is” none other than Georg Brandes (Sprinchorn 2020, 505–9). In fact, from this point on in the book, Sprinchorn reads virtually all the characters in the last four plays unequivocally as either Ibsen himself, specific people known to Ibsen, or allegories of previous works by Ibsen. At the same time, Sprinchorn notes the importance of a non-biographical reading of The Master Builder by Maurice Maeterlinck that emphasized its contribution to symbolist dram