An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway Part 13

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

This article must be read with caution, partly because its a.n.a.lysis 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 Bjrnson 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 pa.s.sions, 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 pa.s.sions 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 mrke 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 _Oth.e.l.lo_ was a mere monograph; _Lear_ is a cosmic picture. Shakespeare turns from _Oth.e.l.lo_ to _Lear_ in consequence of the necessity which the poet feels to supplement and round out his beginning." _Oth.e.l.lo_ is n.o.ble chamber music; _Lear_ is a symphony played by a gigantic orchestra. It is the n.o.blest 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 _Coriola.n.u.s_, an aristocratic contempt for the ma.s.s 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 _Coriola.n.u.s_. The great patrician lives on the heights, and will not hear of bending to the crowd. The contempt of Coriola.n.u.s grew to the storming rage of Timon. When Coriola.n.u.s meets with ingrat.i.tude, 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 (Oth.e.l.lo) 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 acc.u.mulated 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 Mller in _Nordisk Tidskrift for 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 a.s.sailed 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 _Coriola.n.u.s_ 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sion for the familiar anecdote has led him to embellish it with immense enthusiasm and circ.u.mstantiality.

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 a.s.sume 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 cra.s.s naturalism; in _Lucrece_ a high and spiritual morality. In the sonnets the same ant.i.thesis 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 n.o.ble 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 dd fra denne stund, og de for mig som skygger blot skal vaere.

I avgrunds dyp jeg al bekymring kaster!

for andres rst min hresans er slv.

Hvadenten de mig roser eller laster, jeg som en hugorm er og vorder dv.

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, t.i.tania, 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 l.u.s.ty; 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;

[22. See pp. 71 ff. below.]