The Mystic and Modernity: Unfolding Past and Present inEmperor and Galilean

Abstract

Henrik Ibsen's first prose drama, Kejser og Galilaeer. Et verdenshistorisk skuespill (Emperor and Galilean. A World-Historic Drama, 1873), set in the fourth century, tells the story of Emperor Julian. Several critics have argued that, with Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen did not only forge history into a modern form, he also turned to history to say something essential about the emergence of a new world and about the complex landscape of ideas and politics distinguishing his own time. 1 The second half of the nineteenth century saw great changes in infrastructure, upheavals in society, and the rise and fall of several European kingdoms and empires, and Julia Walker draws attention to the recurring oppositions when she sums up Ibsen's project in Emperor and Galilean:Attempting to riddle out the puzzles of his own historical moment, Ibsen borrowed from Hegel to oppose society and the individual, state and church, reason and faith, old and new, flesh and spirit, "Hellenist" and "Nazarene," plotting the dialectical processes that propelled the Ancient world into the Modern era. (Walker 2014, 152