An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway

by Martin B. Ruud

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 Bjørnson 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,[^II.15] at that time issued in Bergen, two articles on Shakespeare's Work in his Period of Gloom (Shakespeare i hans Digtnings mørke 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.

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.