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,[15] at that time issued in Bergen, two articles on Shakespeare’s Work in his Period of Gloom (Shakespeare i hans Digtnings morke 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.

    [15.  Vol.  VI, pp. 49 ff.]