Martin Brown Ruud - An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway

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[12. 1880, pp. 61-71.]

Bing begins by defining two kinds of writers. First, those whose power
is their keen observation. They see things accurately and they secure
their effects by recording just what they see. Second, those writers
who do not merely see external phenomena with the external eye, but
who, through a miraculous intuition, go deeper into the soul of man.
Moliere is the classical example of the first type; Shakespeare of the
second. To him a chance utterance reveals feelings, passions, whole
lives--though he probably never developed the consequences of a chance
remark to their logical conclusion without first applying to them close
and searching rational processes. But it is clear that if a critic is to
analyze a character of Shakespeare's, he must not be content merely to
observe. He must feel with it, live with it. He must do so with special
sympathy in the case of Ophelia.

The common characteristic of Shakespeare's women is their devotion to
the man of their choice and their confidence that this choice is wise
and happy. The tragedy of Ophelia lies in the fact that outward evidence
is constantly shocking that faith. Laertes, in his worldly-wise fashion,
first warns her. She cries out from a broken heart though she promises
to heed the warning. Then comes Polonius with his cunning wisdom. But
Ophelia's faith is still unshaken. She promises her father, however, to
be careful, and her caution, in turn, arouses the suspicion of Hamlet.
Even after his wild outburst against her he still loves her. He begs her
to believe in him and to remember him in her prayers. But suspicion goes
on. Ophelia is caught between devotion and duty, and the grim events
that crowd upon her plunge her to sweet, tragic death. Nothing could be
more revealing than our last glimpse of her. Shakespeare's intuitive
knowledge of the soul was sure. The determining fact of her life was her
love for Hamlet: it is significant that when we see her insane not a
mention of it crosses her lips.

Hamlet and Ophelia are the delicate victims of a tragic necessity. They
are undone because they lose confidence in those to whom they cling with
all the abandon of deep, spiritual souls. Hamlet is at last aroused to
desperation; Ophelia is helplessly crushed. She is the finest woman
of Shakespeare's imagination, and perhaps for that reason the most
difficult to understand and the one least often appreciated.

The next chapter in Norwegian Shakespeareana is a dull, unprofitable
one--a series of articles on the Baconian theory appearing irregularly
in the monthly magazine, _Kringsjaa_. The first article appeared in the
second volume (1894) and is merely a review of a strong pro-Bacon
outburst in the American _Arena_. It is not worth criticising. Similar
articles appeared in _Kringsjaa_ in 1895, the material this time being
taken from the _Deutsche Revue_. It is the old ghost, the cipher in the
first folio, though not Ignatius Donnelly's cryptogram. Finally, in
1898, a new editor, Chr. Brinckmann, printed[13] a crushing reply to all
these cryptogram fantasies. And that is all that was ever published in
Norway on a foolish controversy.

[13. _Kringsjaa_. Vol. XII, pp. 777 ff. The article upon which
this reply was based was from the _Quarterly Review_.]

It is a relief to turn from puerilities of this sort to Theodor
Caspari's article in _For Kirke og Kultur_ (1895)[14]--_Grunddrag ved
den Shakespeareske Digtning, i saerlig Jevnfoerelse med Ibsens senere
Digtning_.

[14. Vol. I, pp. 38 ff.]

This article must be read with caution, partly because its analysis
of the Elizabethan age is conventional, and therefore superficial, and
partly because it represents a direction of thought which eyed the later
work of Ibsen and Bjornson with distrust. These men had rejected the
faith of their fathers, and the books that came from them were signs of
the apostasy. But _For Kirke og Kultur_ has been marked from its first
number by ability, conspicuous fairness, and a large catholicity, which
give it an honorable place among church journals. And not even a
fanatical admirer of Ibsen will deny that there is more than a grain of
truth in the indictment which the writer of this article brings against
him.

The central idea is the large, general objectivity of Shakespeare's
plays as contrasted with the narrow, selfish subjectivity of Ibsen's.
The difference bottoms in the difference between the age of Elizabeth
and our own. Those were days of full, pulsing, untrammeled life. Men
lived big, physical lives. They had few scruples and no nerves.
Full-blooded passions, not petty problems of pathological psychology,
were the things that interested poets and dramatists. They saw life
fully and they saw it whole. So with Shakespeare. His characters are
big, well-rounded men; they are not laboratory specimens. They live in
the real Elizabethan world, not in the hothouse of the poet's brain. It
is of no consequence that violence is done to "local color." Shakespeare
beheld all the world and all ages through the lens of his own time and
country, but because the men he saw were actual, living beings, the
characters he gives us, be they mythological figures, Romans, Greeks,
Italians, or Englishmen, have universal validity. He went to Italy for
his greatest love-story. That gave him the right atmosphere. It is
significant that Ibsen once thought it necessary to seek a suggestive
background for one of his greatest characters. He went to Finmarken for
Rebecca West.

Shakespeare's characters speak in loud, emphatic tones and they give
utterance to clear, emphatic thoughts. There is no "twilight zone" in
their thinking. Ibsen's men and women, like the children at Rosmersholm,
never speak aloud; they merely whimper or they whisper the polite
innuendos of the drawing room. The difference lies largely in the
difference of the age. But Ibsen is more decadent than his age. There
are great ideas in our time too, but Ibsen does not see them. He sees
only the "thought." Contrast with this Shakespeare's colossal scale.
He is "loud-voiced" but he is also "many-voiced." Ibsen speaks in a
salon voice and always in one key. And the remarkable thing is that
Shakespeare, in spite of his complicated plots, is always clear. The
main lines of the action stand out boldly. There is always speed and
movement--a speed and movement directly caused by powerful feelings. He
makes his readers think on a bigger scale than does Ibsen. His passions
are sounder because they are larger and more expansive.

Shakespeare is the dramatist of our average life; Ibsen, the poet of
the rare exception. To Shakespeare's problems there is always an answer;
underneath his storms there is peace, not merely filth and doubt. There
is even a sense of a greater power--calm and immovable as history
itself. Ibsen's plays are nervous, hectic, and unbelieving. In the words
of Rosmer: "Since there is no judge over us, we must hold a judgment day
for ourselves." Contrast this with Hamlet's soliloquy. And, finally,
one feels sure in Shakespeare that the play means something. It has a
beginning and an end. "What shall we say of plays like Ibsen's, in which
Act I and Act II give no clue to Act III, and where both question and
answer are hurled at us in the same speech?"

In the same year, 1895, Georg Brandes published in _Samtiden_,[15] at
that time issued in Bergen, two articles on _Shakespeare's Work in his
Period of Gloom_ (Shakespeare i hans Digtnings morke Periode) which
embody in compact form that thesis since elaborated in his big work.
Shakespeare's tragedies were the outcome of a deep pessimism that had
grown for years and culminated when he was about forty. He was tired of
the vice, the hollowness, the ungratefulness, of life. The immediate
cause must remain unknown, but the fact of his melancholy seems clear
enough. His comedy days were over and he began to portray a side of life
which he had hitherto kept hidden. _Julius Caesar_ marks the transition.
In Brutus we are reminded that high-mindedness in the presence of a
practical situation often fails, and that practical mistakes are often
as fatal as moral ones. From Brutus, Shakespeare came to Hamlet, a
character in transition from fine youth, full of illusions, to a manhood
whose faith is broken by the hard facts of the world. This is distinctly
autobiographical. _Hamlet_ and Sonnet 66 are of one piece. Shakespeare
was disillusioned. Add to this his struggle against his enemy,
Puritanism, and a growing conviction that the miseries of life bottom
in ignorance, and the reason for his growing pessimism becomes clear.
From Hamlet, whom the world crushes, to Macbeth, who faces it with its
own weapons, yet is haunted and terrified by what he does, the step is
easy. He knew Macbeth as he knew Hamlet.

[15. Vol. VI, pp. 49 ff.]

The scheming Iago, too, he must have known, for he has portrayed
him with matchless art. "But _Othello_ was a mere monograph; _Lear_
is a cosmic picture. Shakespeare turns from _Othello_ to _Lear_ in
consequence of the necessity which the poet feels to supplement and
round out his beginning." _Othello_ is noble chamber music; _Lear_ is a
symphony played by a gigantic orchestra. It is the noblest of all the
tragedies, for in it are all the storm and tumult of life, all that
was struggling and raging in his own soul. We may feel sure that
the ingratitude he had met with is reflected in Goneril and Regan.
Undoubtedly, in the same way, the poet had met the lovely Cleopatra
and knew what it was to be ensnared by her.

Brandes, as has often been pointed out, did not invent this theory
of Shakespeare's psychology but he elaborated it with a skill and
persuasiveness which carried the uncritical away.

In his second article Brandes continues his analysis of Shakespeare's
pessimism. In the period of the great tragedies there can be no doubt
that Shakespeare was profoundly pessimistic. There was abundant reason
for it. The age of Elizabeth was an age of glorious sacrifices, but it
was also an age of shameless hypocrisy, of cruel and unjust punishments,
of downright oppression. Even the casual observer might well grow sick
at heart. A nature so finely balanced as Shakespeare's suffered a
thousandfold. Hence this contempt for life which showed only corruption
and injustice. Cressida and Cleopatra are sick with sin and evil; the
men are mere fools and brawlers.

There is, moreover, a feeling that he is being set aside for younger
men. We find clear expression of this in _All's Well That Ends Well_,
in _Troilus and Cressida_. There is, too, in _Troilus and Cressida_
a speech which shows the transition to the mood of _Coriolanus_, an
aristocratic contempt for the mass of mankind. This is the famous speech
in which Ulysses explains the necessity of social distinctions. Note
in this connection Casca's contemptuous reference to the plebeians,
Cleopatra's fear of being shown to the mob. Out of this feeling grew
_Coriolanus_. The great patrician lives on the heights, and will not
hear of bending to the crowd. The contempt of Coriolanus grew to the
storming rage of Timon. When Coriolanus meets with ingratitude, he takes
up arms; Timon is too supremely indifferent to do even this.

Thus Shakespeare's pessimism grew from grief over the power of evil
(Othello) and misery over life's sorrows, to bitter hatred (Timon).
And when he had raged to the uttermost, something of the resignation
of old age came to him. We have the evidence of this in his last works.
Perhaps, as in the case of his own heroes, a woman saved him. Brandes
feels that the evolution of Shakespeare as a dramatist is to be traced
in his women. We have first the domineering scold, reminding him
possibly of his own domestic relations (Lady Macbeth); second, the
witty, handsome women (Portia, Rosalind); third, the simple, naive women
(Ophelia, Desdemona); fourth, the frankly sensuous women (Cleopatra,
Cressida); and, finally, the young woman viewed with all an old man's
joy (Miranda). Again his genius exercises his spell. Then, like
Prospero, he casts his magician's staff into the sea.

In 1896 Brandes published his great work on Shakespeare. It arrested
attention immediately in every country of the world. Never had a book so
fascinating, so brilliant, so wonderfully suggestive, been written on
Shakespeare. The literati were captivated. But alas, scholars were not.
They admitted that Brandes had written an interesting book, that he had
accumulated immense stores of information and given to these sapless
materials a new life and a new attractiveness. But they pointed out that
not only did his work contain gross positive errors, but it consisted,
from first to last, of a tissue of speculations which, however
ingenious, had no foundation in fact and no place in cool-headed
criticism.[16] Theodor Bierfreund, one of the most brilliant Shakespeare
scholars in Denmark, almost immediately attacked Brandes in a long
article in the Norwegian periodical _Samtiden_.[17]

[16. Cf. Vilhelm Moller in _Nordisk Tidskrift foer Vetenskap, Konst
och Industri_. 1896, pp. 501-519.]

[17. _Samtiden_, 1896. (VII), pp. 382 ff.]

He acknowledges the great merits of the work. It is an enormously rich
compilation of Shakespeare material gathered from the four corners of
the earth and illuminated by the genius of a great writer. He gives the
fullest recognition to Brandes' miraculous skill in analyzing characters
and making them live before our eyes. But he warns us that Brandes is no
critical student of source materials, and that we must be on our guard
in accepting his conclusions. It is not so certain that the sonnets mean
all that Brandes would have them mean, and it is certain that we must
be cautious in inferring too much from _Troilus and Cressida_ and
_Pericles_ for, in the opinion of the reviewer, Shakespeare probably had
little or nothing to do with them. He then sketches briefly his theory
that these plays cannot be Shakespeare's, a theory which he later
elaborated in his admirably written monograph, _Shakespeare og hans
Kunst_.[18] This, however, belongs to the study of Shakespearean
criticism in Denmark.

[18. Copenhagen, 1898.]

So far as I have been able to find, Bierfreund's review was the only one
published in Norway immediately after the publication of Brandes' work,
but in 1899, S. Brettville Jensen took up the matter again in _For Kirke
og Kultur_[19] and, in 1901, Christen Collin vigorously assailed in
_Samtiden_ that elaborate and fanciful theory of the sonnets which plays
so great a part in Brandes' study of Shakespeare.

[19. Vol. VI (1899), pp. 400 ff.]

Brettville Jensen praises Brandes highly. He is always interesting, in
harmony with his age, and in rapport with his reader. "But his book is a
fantasy palace, supported by columns as lovely as they are hollow and
insecure, and hovering in rainbow mists between earth and sky." Brandes
has rare skill in presenting hypotheses as facts. He has attempted to
reconstruct the life of Shakespeare from his works. Now this is a mode
of criticism which may yield valuable results, but clearly it must be
used with great care. Shakespeare knew the whole of life, but how he
came to know it is another matter. Brandes thinks he has found the
secret. Back of every play and every character there is a personal
experience. But this is rating genius altogether too cheap. One must
concede something to the imagination and the creative ability of the
poet. To relate everything in Shakespeare's dramas to the experiences
of Shakespeare the man, is both fanciful and uncritical.

The same objection naturally holds regarding the meaning of the sonnets
which Brandes has made his own. Here we must bear in mind the fact that
much of the language in the sonnets is purely conventional. We should
have a difficult time indeed determining just how much is biographical
and how much belongs to the stock in trade of Elizabethan sonneteers.
Brettville Jensen points out that if the sonnets are the expression of
grief at the loss of his beloved, it is a queer contradiction that
Sonnet 144, which voices his most poignant sorrow, should date from
1599, the year, according to Brandes, when Shakespeare's comedy period
began!

It is doubtless true that the plays and even the sonnets mark great
periods in the life of the poet, but we may be sure that the relation
between experience and literary creation was not so literal as Brandes
would have us believe. The change from mood to mood, from play to play,
was gradual, and it never destroyed Shakespeare's poise and sanity. We
shall not judge Shakespeare rightly if we believe that personal feeling
rather than artistic truth shaped his work.

Two years later Collin, a critic of fine insight and appreciation, wrote
in _Samtiden_[20] an article on the sonnets of Shakespeare. He begins by
picturing Shakespeare's surprise if he could rise from his grave in the
little church at Stratford and look upon the pompous and rather naive
bust, and hear the strange tongues of the thousands of pilgrims at his
shrine. Even greater would be his surprise if he could examine the
ponderous tomes in the Shakespeare Memorial Library at Birmingham which
have been written to explain him and his work. And if any of these
volumes could interest him at all it would doubtless be those in which
ingenious critics have attempted to discover the poet in the plays and
the poems. Collin then gives a brief survey of modern Shakespearean
criticism--Furnivall, Dowden, Brandl, Boas, ten Brink, and, more
recently, Sidney, Lee, Brandes, and Bierfreund. An important object of
the study of these men has been to fix the chronology of the plays. They
seldom fully agree. Sidney Lee and the Danish critic, Bierfreund, do not
accept the usual theory that the eight tragedies from _Julius Caesar_ to
_Coriolanus_ reflect a period of gloom and pessimism. In their opinion
psychological criticism has, in this instance, proved a dismal failure.

[20. Vol. XII, pp. 61 ff.]

The battle has raged with particular violence about the sonnets.
Most scholars assume that we have in them a direct presentation
(fremstilling) of a definite period in the life of the poet. And by
placing this period directly before the creation of _Hamlet_, Brandes
has succeeded in making the relations to the "dark lady" a crisis in
Shakespeare's life. The story, which, as Brandes tells it, has a
remarkable similarity to an ultra-modern naturalistic novel, becomes
even more piquant since Brandes knows the name of the lady, nay, even of
the faithless friend. All this information Brandes has, of course, taken
from Thomas Tyler's introduction to the Irving edition of the sonnets
(1890), but his passion for the familiar anecdote has led him to
embellish it with immense enthusiasm and circumstantiality.

The hypothesis, however, is essentially weak. Collin disagrees
absolutely with Lee that the sonnets are purely conventional, without
the slightest biographical value. Mr. Lee has weakened his case by
admitting that "key-sonnet" No. 144 is autobiographical. Now, if this
be true, then one must assume that the sonnets set forth Shakespeare's
relations to a real man and a real woman. But the most convincing
argument against the Herbert-Fitton theory lies in the chronology. It is
certain that the sonnet fashion was at its height immediately after the
publication of Sidney's sequence in 1591, and it seems equally certain
that it had fallen off by 1598. This chronology is rendered probable
by two facts about Shakespeare's work. First, Shakespeare employs the
sonnet in dialogue in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and in _Romeo and
Juliet_. These plays belong to the early nineties. Second, the moods
of the sonnets exactly correspond, on the one hand, to the exuberant
sensuality of _Venus and Adonis_, on the other, to the restraint of the
_Lucrece_.

An even safer basis for determining the chronology of the sonnets Collin
finds in the group in which the poet laments his poverty and his outcast
state. If the sonnets are autobiographical--and Collin agrees with
Brandes that they are--then this group (26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 49, 66,
71-75, 99, 110-112, 116, 119, 120, 123, and 124) must refer to a time
when the poet was wretched, poor, and obscure. And in this case, the
sonnets cannot be placed at 1598-99, when Shakespeare was neither poor
nor despised, a time in which, according to Brandes, he wrote his gayest
comedies.

It seems clear from all this that the sonnets cannot be placed so late
as 1598-1600. They do not fit the facts of Shakespeare's life at this
time. But they do fit the years from 1591 to 1594, and especially the
years of the plague, 1592-3, when the theaters were generally closed,
and Shakespeare no doubt had to battle for a mere existence. In 1594
Shakespeare's position became more secure. He gained the favor of
Southampton and dedicated the _Rape of Lucrece_ to him.

Collin develops at this point with a good deal of fullness his
theory that the motifs of the sonnets recur in _Venus and Adonis_
and _Lucrece_--in _Venus and Adonis_, a certain crass naturalism;
in _Lucrece_ a high and spiritual morality. In the sonnets the same
antithesis is found. Compare Sonnet 116--in praise of friendship--with
129, in which is pictured the tyranny and the treachery of sensual love.
These two forces, sensual love and platonic friendship, were mighty
cultural influences during Shakespeare's apprentice years and the young
poet shows plainly that he was moved by both.

If all this be true, then the Herbert-Fitton theory falls to the ground,
for in 1597 Herbert was only seventeen. But unquestionably the sonnets
are autobiographical. They reveal with a poignant power Shakespeare's
sympathy, his unique ability to enter into another personality, his
capacity of imaginative expansion to include the lives of others.
Compare the noble sonnet 112, which Collin translates:

Din kjaerlighed og medynk daekker til
det ar, som sladderen paa min pande trykket.
Lad andre tro og sige, hvad de vil,--
du kjaerlig mine feil med fortrin smykket.

Du er mit verdensalt, og fra din mund
jeg henter al min skam og al min aere.
For andre er jeg dod fra denne stund,
og de for mig som skygger blot skal vaere.

I avgrunds dyp jeg al bekymring kaster!
for andres rost min horesans er slov.
Hvadenten de mig roser eller laster,
jeg som en hugorm er og vorder dov.

Saa helt du fylder ut min sjael herinde,
at hele verden synes at forsvinde.

At this point the article in _Samtiden_ closes. Collin promises to give
in a later number, a metrical translation of a number of significant
sonnets. The promised renderings, however, never appeared. Thirteen
years later, in 1914, the author, in a most interesting and illuminating
book, _Det Geniale Menneske_,[21] a study of "genius" and its relation
to civilization, reprinted his essay in _Samtiden_ and supplemented it
with three short chapters. In the first of these he endeavors to show
that in the sonnets Shakespeare gives expression to two distinct
tendencies of the Renaissance--the tendency toward a loose and
unregulated gratification of the senses, and the tendency toward an
elevated and platonic conception of friendship. Shakespeare sought in
both of these a compensation for his own disastrous love affair and
marriage. But the healing that either could give was at best transitory.
There remained to him as a poet of genius one resource. He could gratify
his own burning desire for a pure and unselfish love by living in his
mighty imagination the lives of his characters. "He who in his yearning
for the highest joys of love had been compelled to abandon hope, found
a joy mingled with pain, in giving of his life to lovers in whom the
longing of William Shakespeare lives for all time.

"He has loved and been loved. It was he whom Sylvia, Hermia, Titania,
Portia, Juliet, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, and Olivia loved,--and
Ophelia, Desdemona, Hermione and Miranda."

[21. Chr. Collin, Christiania. 1914. H. Aschehoug & Co.]

In the second chapter Collin argues, as he had done in his essay on
_Hamlet_[22] that Shakespeare's great tragedies voice no pessimism, but
the stern purpose to strengthen himself and his contemporaries against
the evils and vices of Jacobean England--that period of moral and
intellectual disintegration which followed the intense life of the
Elizabethan age. Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the
Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers
of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against
the forces of ruin and decay. "To hold the mirror up to nature," that
men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the
social body. And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun
moralizing. He warns against sensual excess in Adam's speech in _As You
Like It_, II, 3:

Let me be your servant;
Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood;
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility;

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