An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway - Martin Brown Ruud (book club reads .TXT) 📗

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 Møller in _Nordisk Tidskrift för 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