An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway by Martin Brown Ruud (best novels of all time .TXT) π
a remarkable group of men: Nils Krog Bredal, composer of the first
Danish opera, John Gunnerus, theologian and biologist, Gerhart SchΓΈning,
rector of the Cathedral School and author of an elaborate history of the
fatherland, and Peter Suhm, whose 14,047 pages on the history of Denmark
testify to a learning, an industry, and a generous devotion to
scholarship which few have rivalled.
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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 MΓΈller in _Nordisk Tidskrift fΓΆr 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
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