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.[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.[17]

    [16.  Cf.  Vilhelm Moller in Nordisk Tidskrift foer Vetenskap, Konst
    och Industri. 1896, pp. 501-519.]

    [17. Samtiden, 1896. (VII), pp. 382 ff.]

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

    [18.  Copenhagen, 1898.]

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.

    [19.  Vol.  VI (1899), pp. 400 ff.]