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.[II.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.[II.17]
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.[II.18] This, however, belongs to the study of Shakespearean criticism in Denmark.
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[II.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.
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[II.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.
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.