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.
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.