Martin B. Ruud

“ He sees the world as a mass of faithlessness, and the weight of it crushes him and makes him sick at heart. This is the tragedy of Hamlet—his will is paralyzed and, with it, his passion for revenge. He fights a double battle, against his uncle and against himself. The conviction that Shakespeare, and not his predecessor, has given this turn to the tragedy is sustained by the other plays of the same period, Lear and Timon of Athens. They exhibit three different stages of the same disease, a disease in which man's natural love of fighting is turned against himself. ”

“ It is characteristic of Shakespeare that the lovers do not dream fairy tales of their childhood. Higher culture has given them deeper passions, more intense personal relations; in dreams they but continue the life of waking. But the good weaver who lives thoroughly content in his own self-satisfaction and in the esteem of his neighbors, who has never reflected upon anything that has happened to him, but has received each day's blessings as they have come—this man sees, the moment he lays his head on the pillow, the fairies and the fairy queen. ”

“ Collin admits, nevertheless, that there may be something autobiographical in the great tragedies. Undoubtedly Shakespeare felt that there was an iron discipline in beholding a great tragedy. To live it over in the soul tempered it, gave it firmness and resolution, and it is not impossible that the sympathetic, high-strung Shakespeare needed just such discipline. But we must not forget the element of play. All art is, in a sense, a game with images and feelings and human utterances. ”

“ Too often at a modern presentation we feel that we are seeing a succession of scenes rather than unified, organic drama. But, after all, the main thing is the substance—"the weighty content, and this will most certainly secure for them for a long time to come a place in the repertoire of the theater of the Germanic world. So long as we admit that in the delineation of character, in the presentation of noble figures, and in the mastery of dialogue, Shakespeare is unexcelled, so long we must admit that Shakespeare has a place on the modern stage." ”

“ In Othello, jealousy; in Hamlet, despair; in Romeo and Juliet, love, are sung in tones which penetrate to the depths of the soul. Against the background of bitter feud, the love of Romeo and Juliet stands out victorious and beneficent. Even if we cannot comprehend this passion, we can, at least, feel the ennobling power of the story. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even Tieck's and Schlegel's German, or Hagberg's Swedish, or Foersom's Danish is no substitute for Shakespeare. Whether or not Madhus measures up to these is not for me to decide, but I feel very certain that he will not suffer by comparison with the Danish versions by Wolff, Meisling, Wosemose, or even Lembcke, or with the Norwegian versions of Hauge and Lassen. The feeling that one gets in reading Madhus is not that he is uncouth, still less inaccurate, but that in the presence of great imaginative richness he becomes cold and barren. ”

“ Shakespeare's extreme objectivity makes snap judgments unsafe. We cannot always be sure that his characters voice his own thoughts and judgments, but, on the other hand, we have no right to assume that they never do. The tragedies especially afford a safe basis for judgment, for in them characterization is of the greatest importance. No great character was ever created which did not spring from the poet's own soul. In Shakespeare's characters sin, lust, cruelty, are always punished; sympathy, love, kindness are everywhere glorified. ”

“ Shakespeare preserves this unity in duality. The two worlds seem to meet and fuse, each giving something of itself to the other. But this unity was absent from the performance. The actors did not even know their lines, and thus the spell was broken. The verse must flow from the lips in a limpid stream, especially in a fairy play; the words must never seem a burden. But even this elementary rule was ignored in our performance. And the ballet of the fairies was so bad that it might better have been omitted. Puck should not have been given by a woman, but by a boy as he was in Shakespeare's day. ”

“ In all this century-old discussion about the subtlety of Hamlet's character critics have forgotten that a piece of literature is, first of all, a festive sport with clear pictures, finely organized emotions, and eloquent words uttered in moments of deep feeling. ”

“ Whether Norway is always to go to Denmark for her standard Shakespeare, or whether she is to have one of her own is, as yet, a question impossible to answer. A pure Landsmaal translation cannot satisfy, and many Norwegians refuse to recognize the Riksmaal as Norwegian at all. In the far, impenetrable future the language question may settle itself, and when that happy day comes, but not before, we may look with some confidence for a "standard" Shakespeare in a literary garb which all Norwegians will recognize as their own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A respectable, fat citizen dreams one night that he is to experience the great triumph of his life. He is to be presented before the duke's throne as the greatest of heroes. He dreams that he cannot get dressed, that he cannot get his head attended to, because, as a matter of fact, his head is not his own excellent head, but the head of an ass with long ears, a snout, and hair that itches. 'This is exactly like a fairy tale of my youth,' he dreams. ”

“ When the dramatic feeling warrants it, the humblest rise to the highest poetry. The renaissance was an age of deeper, mightier feelings than our own, and this intense life speaks in verse, for only thus can it adequately express itself. ”

“ Obviously, by actors of the first order and with costumes and scenery the most splendid. This goes without saying, for the play is intended quite as much to be seen as to be heard. To do it justice, the performance must bring out some of the splendor and the fantasy with which it was conceived. As we read A Midsummer Night's Dream it is easy to imagine the glorious succession of splendid scenes, but on the stage the characters become flesh and blood with fixed limitations, and the illusion is easily lost unless every agency is used to carry it out. ”

“ And one longs to present a play which has been a guiding star to oneself. I knew perfectly well that a public fresh from Orpheus would not at once respond, but I felt assured that response would come in time. As soon, therefore, as I had become acclimated as director and knew something of the resources of the theater, I made the venture. This is not a play to be given toward the end; it is too valuable as a means of gaining that which is to be the end—for the players and for the audience. So far as the actors are concerned, our exertions have been profitable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Does not such apparatus rather destroy the illusion? "The new inventions of stage mechanicians are far from being under such perfect control that they do not often ruin art. We are in a period of transition. Why should we here, who are obliged to wait a long time for what is admittedly satisfactory, commit all the blunders which mark the way to acknowledged perfection?"
It would probably be difficult to find definite and tangible evidence of Shakespeare's influence in Bjørnson's work, and we are, therefore, doubly glad to have his own eloquent acknowledgement of his debt to Shakespeare. ”

“ I felt that I had in my soul something that could produce a play with a little of the fancy and joy of A Midsummer Night's Dream—and I made resolutions. But the conditions under which a worker in art lives in Norway are hard, and all we say or promise avails nothing. ”

“ Hamlet and Ophelia are the delicate victims of a tragic necessity. They are undone because they lose confidence in those to whom they cling with all the abandon of deep, spiritual souls. Hamlet is at last aroused to desperation; Ophelia is helplessly crushed. She is the finest woman of Shakespeare's imagination, and perhaps for that reason the most difficult to understand and the one least often appreciated.
The next chapter in Norwegian Shakespeareana is a dull, unprofitable one—a series of articles on the Baconian theory appearing irregularly in the monthly magazine, Kringsjaa. ”

“ Wherever he is read he becomes the spokesman against narrowness, dogmatism, and intolerance. To translate Shakespeare, he points out, is difficult because of the archaic language, the obscure allusions, and the intense originality of the expression. Shakespeare, indeed, is as much the creator as the user of his mother-tongue. The one translation of Macbeth in existence, Foersom's, is good, but it is only in part Shakespeare, and the times require something more adequate and "something more distinctly our own." ”

“ If we look over the field of Norwegian translation of Shakespeare, the impression we get is not one to inspire awe. The translations are neither numerous nor important. There is nothing to be compared with the German of Tieck and Schlegel the Danish of Foersom, or the Swedish of Hagberg.
But the reason is obvious. Down to 1814 Norway was politically and culturally a dependency of Denmark. Copenhagen was the seat of government, of literature, and of polite life. To Copenhagen cultivated Norwegians looked for their models and their ideals. ”

“ For the interests that make up the life of the people—their family and community affairs, their arts and crafts and folk-lore, the dialects of Norway, like the dialects of any other country, have a vocabulary amazingly rich and complete.I.17 But not all ideas belong in the realm of the every-day, and the great difficulty of the Landsmaal movement is precisely this—that it must develop a "culture language." ”

“ He has confined himself severely to his task as thus limited, even cutting out lines from the middle of speeches when these lines refer to another part of the action or to another group of characters. What we have is, then, a fragment, to be defended only as an experiment, and successful in proportion as it renders single lines, speeches, or songs well. On the whole, Eggen has been successful. There is a vigor and directness in his style which, indeed, seem rather Norwegian than Shakespearean, but which are, nevertheless, entirely convincing. One is scarcely conscious that it is a translation. ”

“ What we have said of Macbeth applies with no less force here. The translation is more than merely creditable—it is distinctly good. And certainly it is no small feat to have translated Shakespeare in all his richness and fulness into what was only fifty years ago a rustic and untrained dialect. It is the best answer possible to the charge often made against Landsmaal that it is utterly unable to convey the subtle thought of high and cosmopolitan culture. ”

“ 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. ”