[24. Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice.  Med Anmaerkninger og
    Indledning.  Udgivet af G. Wiesener.  Kristiania, 1880.]

Wiesener’s edition was published in 1880 in Christiania.  The text is that of the Cambridge edition with a few necessary cuttings to adapt it for school reading.  His introduction covers fifty-two closely printed pages and gives, within these limits, an exceedingly detailed account of the English drama, the Elizabethan stage, Shakespeare’s life and work, and a careful study of The Merchant of Venice itself.  The editor does not pretend to originality; he has simply tried to bring together well ascertained facts and to present them in the simplest, clearest fashion possible.  But the Indledning is to-day, thirty-five years after it was written, fully up to the standard of the best annotated school editions in this country or in England.  It is, of course, a little dry and schematic; that could hardly be avoided in an attempt to compress such a vast amount of information into such a small compass, but, for the most part, the details are so clear and vivid that their mass rather heightens than blurs the picture.

From the fact that nothing in this introduction is original, it is hardly necessary to criticise it at length; all that may be demanded is a short survey of the contents.  The whole consists of two great divisions, a general introduction to Shakespeare and a special introduction to The Merchant of Venice.  The first division is, in turn, subdivided into seven heads:  1. The Pre-Shakespearean Drama. 2. The Life of Shakespeare. 3. Shakespeare’s Works—­Order and Chronology. 4. Shakespeare as a Dramatist. 5. Shakespeare’s Versification. 6. The Text of Shakespeare. 7. The Theatres of Shakespeare’s Time.  This introduction fills thirty-nine pages and presents an exceedingly useful compendium for the student and the general reader.  The short introduction to the play itself discusses briefly the texts, the sources, the characters, Shakespeare’s relation to his material and, finally, the meaning of the play.  The last section is, however, a translation from Taine and not Wiesener’s at all.

The text itself is provided with elaborate notes of the usual text-book sort.  In addition to these there is, at the back, an admirable series of notes on the language of Shakespeare.  Wiesener explains in simple, compact fashion some of the differences between Elizabethan and modern English and traces these phenomena back to their origins in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.  Inadequate as they are, these linguistic notes cannot be too highly praised for the conviction of which they bear evidence—­that a complete knowledge of Shakespeare without a knowledge of his language is impossible.  To the student of that day these notes must have been a revelation.

The second text edition of a Shakespearean play in Norway was Collin’s The Merchant of Venice.[25] His introduction covers much the same ground as Wiesener’s, but he offers no sketch of the Elizabethan drama, of Shakespeare’s life, or of his development as a dramatic artist.  On the other hand, his critical analysis of the play is fuller and, instead of a mere summary, he gives an elaborate exposition of Shakespeare’s versification.