C
In 1865, Paul Botten Hansen, best known to the English-speaking world for his relations with Bjørnson and Ibsen, reviewed[I.11] the eleventh installment of Lembcke's translation of Shakespeare. The article does not venture into criticism, but is almost entirely a resumé of Shakespeare translation in Norway and Denmark. It is less well informed than we should expect, and contains, among several other slips, the following "...in 1855, Niels Hauge, deceased the following year as teacher in Kragerø, translated Macbeth, the first faithful version of this masterpiece which Dano-Norwegian literature could boast of." Botten Hansen mentions only one previous Danish or Norwegian version of Shakespeare—Foersom's adaptation of Schiller's stage version (1816). He is quite obviously ignorant of Rosenfeldt's translation of 1790; and the Rahbek-Sanders translation of 1801 seems also to have escaped him, although Hauge expressly refers to this work in his introduction. Both of these early attempts are in prose; Foersom's, to be sure, is in blank verse, but Foersom's Macbeth is not Shakespeare's. Accordingly, it is, in a sense, true that Hauge in 1855 did give the Dano-Norwegian public their first taste of an unspoiled Macbeth in the vernacular.[I.12]
Hauge tells us that he had interested himself in English literature at the risk of being called an eccentric. Modern languages then offered no avenue to preferment, and why, forsooth, did men attend lectures and take examinations except to gain the means of earning a livelihood? He justifies his interest, however, by the seriousness and industry with which Shakespeare is studied in Germany and England. With the founts of this study he is apparently familiar, and with the influence of Shakespeare on Lessing, Goethe, and the lesser romanticists. It is interesting to note, too, that two scholars, well known in widely different fields, Monrad, the philosopher—for some years a sort of Dr. Johnson in the literary circles of Christiania—and Unger, the scholarly editor of many Old Norse texts, assisted him in his work.
The character of Hauge's work is best seen in his notes. They consist of a careful defense of every liberty he takes with the text, explanations of grammatical constructions, and interpretations of debated matters. For example, he defends the witches on the ground that they symbolize the power of evil in the human soul.
Man kan sige at Shakespeare i dem og deres Slæng har givet de nytestamentlige Dæmoner Kjød og Blod.
(We may say that Shakespeare in them and their train has endowed the demons of the New Testament with flesh and blood). Again, he would change the word incarnadine to incarnate on the ground that Twelfth Night V offers a similar instance of the corrupt use of incardinate for incarnate. The word occurs, moreover, in English only in this passage.[I.13] Again, in his note to Act IV, he points out that the dialogue in which Malcolm tests the sincerity of Macduff is taken almost verbatim from Holinshed. "In performing the play," he suggests, "it should, perhaps, be omitted as it very well may be without injury to the action since the complication which arises through Malcolm's suspicion of Macduff is fully and satisfactorily resolved by the appearance of Rosse." And his note to a passage in Act V is interesting as showing that, wide and thorough as was Hauge's acquaintance with Shakespearean criticism, he had, besides, a first-hand knowledge of the minor Elizabethan dramatists. I give the note in full. "The way to dusty death—
Til dette besynderlige Udtryk, kan foruden hvad Knight og Dyce have at citere, endnu citeres af Fords Perkin Warbeck, II, 2, "I take my leave to travel to my dust."
Hauge was a careful and conscientious scholar. He knew his field and worked with the painstaking fidelity of the man who realizes the difficulty of his task. The translation he gave is of a piece with the man—faithful, laborious, uninspired. But it is, at least, superior to Rosenfeldt and Sander, and Hauge justified his work by giving to his countrymen the best version of Macbeth up to that time.
Monrad himself reviewed Hauge's Macbeth in a careful and well-informed article, in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Videnskab og Literatur, which I shall review later.