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.

Two years later Collin, a critic of fine insight and appreciation, wrote in Samtiden[20] an article on the sonnets of Shakespeare.  He begins by picturing Shakespeare’s surprise if he could rise from his grave in the little church at Stratford and look upon the pompous and rather naive bust, and hear the strange tongues of the thousands of pilgrims at his shrine.  Even greater would be his surprise if he could examine the ponderous tomes in the Shakespeare Memorial Library at Birmingham which have been written to explain him and his work.  And if any of these volumes could interest him at all it would doubtless be those in which ingenious critics have attempted to discover the poet in the plays and the poems.  Collin then gives a brief survey of modern Shakespearean criticism—­Furnivall, Dowden, Brandl, Boas, ten Brink, and, more recently, Sidney, Lee, Brandes, and Bierfreund.  An important object of the study of these men has been to fix the chronology of the plays.  They seldom fully agree.  Sidney Lee and the Danish critic, Bierfreund, do not accept the usual theory that the eight tragedies from Julius Caesar to Coriolanus reflect a period of gloom and pessimism.  In their opinion psychological criticism has, in this instance, proved a dismal failure.