Hertugen:  Din spog er vel en saadan sanger vaerd.  Du mener med at her er alting herlig, sommer, vinter, vaar og hosttid veksler.  Solen skinner, vind og veiret driver.  Vinterblaasten blaaser op og biter og fortaeller uden sminket smiger hvem vi er, og hvor vi os befinder.  Ja, livet her er ei ly for verdens ondskap, er stolt og frit og fuldt av rike glaeder:  hver graasten synes god og kirkeklok, hvert redetrae er jo en sangers slot, og alt er skjont, og alt er saare godt.

Amiens:  Du er en godt benaadet oversaetter, naar du kan tolke skjaebnens harske talesaet i slike sterke, stemningsfulde ord...

  (En hofmand, derefter Jacques og tjenere kommer.)

Hertugen:  Godmorgen, venner—­vel, saa skal vi jage paa vildtet her, de vakre, dumme borgere av denne ode og forlate stad...

  Jacques: 
  Det er synd at sondre deres vakre lemmer
  med pile-odd.

  Amiens: 
      Det samme sier du altid,
  du er for melankolsk og bitter, Jacques.

A careful comparison of the translation with the original will reveal certain verbal resemblances, notably in the duke’s speech: 

  Din spok er vel en saadan sanger vaerd, etc.

But, even allowing for that, it is a rephrasing rather than a translation.  The stage action, too, is changed.  Notice that Jacques appears in the scene, and that in the episode immediately following, the second part of the first lord’s speech is put into Jacques’ mouth.  In other words, he is made to caricature himself!

This is Wildenvey’s attitude throughout.  To take still another example.  Act IV, 2 begins in the English with a brief dialogue in prose between Jacques and the two lords.  In Wildenvey this is changed to a rhymed dialogue in iambic tetrameters between Jacques and Amiens.  In like manner, the blank verse dialogue between Silvius and Phebe (Silvius and Pippa) is in Norwegian rendered, or rather paraphrased, in iambic verse rhyming regularly abab.

Occasionally meanings are read into the play which not only do not belong in Shakespeare but which are ridiculously out of place.  As an illustration, note the dialogue between Orlando and Rosalind in II, 2 (Original, III, 2).  Orlando remarks:  “Your accent is something finer than could be purchased in so remote a dwelling.”  Wildenvey renders this:  “Eders sprog er mer elevert end man skulde vente i disse vilde trakter.  De taler ikke Landsmaal.”  Probably no one would be deceived by this gratuitous satire on the Landsmaal, but, obviously, it has no place in what pretends to be a translation.  The one justification for it is that Shakespeare himself could not have resisted so neat a word-play.

Wildenvey’s version, therefore, can only be characterized as needlessly free.  For the text as such he has absolutely no regard.  But for the fact that he has kept the fable and, for the most part, the characters, intact, we should characterize it as a belated specimen of Sille Beyer’s notorious Shakespeare “bearbeidelser” in Denmark.  But Wildenvey does not take Sille Beyer’s liberties with the dramatis personae and he has, moreover, what she utterly lacked—­poetic genius.